


All the Comforts of Home

by Hth



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Episode: s03e05 A Life in the Day, M/M, POV Alternating, but they mean well, disaster bisexual quentin coldwater, dubious fidelity, just stupid boys being the stupidest, just the very worst role models, shockingly poor communication, the beauty of all life, yep it's a mosaic fic, you know the drill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:34:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 75,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22378780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: The last place he moved into with Eliot was Whitespire, and the place before that was the Physical Kids' cottage, and – third time's a charm, isn't it?  Isn't that how the stories always go?
Relationships: Arielle/Quentin Coldwater, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 263
Kudos: 320





	1. Twelve Hours

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, it's -- a Mosaic fic, so y'all know what's what. Hopefully this is a new variation on the theme -- and if it is, you can thank portraitofemmy for that, because she went through 3X05 damn near frame-by-frame with me, mining for stuff that we hadn't seen adequately explored yet, and has just generally been a delightful secondary backup brain while I was outlining this. (Whatever you find upsetting is mine, though, don't be mean to Em.)

Literally the worst person Quentin can imagine being stuck with in the wilderness doing glorified Sudoku until he probably dies of old age is _Eliot Waugh_ – which, like, Quentin knows that's a shitty and very slightly unfair thing to say, even to himself, because he loves Eliot like a brother and the guy is surprisingly resourceful when the pressure's on, but.

But, okay, not for nothing, but they've been here for one day and he's done nothing helpful, he's been _the opposite of helpful_ , and it's not fucking helpful that he seems so fucking _chill_ about the whole thing, all like – _logic this with me_ and _we can do hard things_ and _let's at least try, huh?_

Sometimes it's the best thing about Eliot, the way that he can grip his composure with both hands and smooth it out like he's neatening up his outfit. The way he pulls himself together and pulls everyone (okay, specifically Quentin, who's the only person in Eliot's world who really needs the help) along with him.

The way he puts his hand on Quentin's shoulder and gently, so infinitely gently, steers him closer to exactly what Quentin is trying to run away from because it's too goddamn hard, because he fails all the time at everything, because it hurts so much to have magic and higher math and the power of destiny all lining up for him but he's still the same fucking failure as ever.

_We can do hard things_ , and the fact that Eliot can say it like he believes it is, sometimes, the very best thing about him.

Sometimes it just makes Quentin want to punch him in his smug mouth.

The best thing about Quentin is – what? That's he's dogged. That he tries hard. And this is a quest that seems tailor-made to reward dogged determination.

Night falls, and Quentin can't seem to stop. His knees hurt, his brain hurts, he's hungry and thirsty and half the tiles are starting to look the same color as the other half of the tiles, and he can't stop, because what does he bring to the table, really, if he doesn't try his hardest? Moderately Socially Maladjusted and a little petty and a little clumsy and – kind, he hopes, he tries to be kind, but what's the point, you know? People don't judge you on your intentions or your charming foibles; people judge you on your deliverables, and a quest is supposed to test you, right? Your – mettle, or something.

He's not a hero. He's not a hero, he's just – he tries hard, he keeps trying, so he has to--

If not that, what's the point? If he can't – what's the – what else make him worthy, don't you have to be – worthy, for a quest? Quentin knows he's not a fundamentally worthy person, but he  _tries_ , he tries and that has to count for something, for at least something, because--

“Hey,” Eliot says, winding a hand in the hood of Quentin's sweatshirt and tugging firmly. “Hey, I'm talking to you. Are you ignoring me or freaking out?”

“Freaking out,” Quentin mutters.

Eliot tugs more sharply, and Quentin staggers gracelessly to one knee and then to his feet, still clutching two tiles in his hands. “Look at me,” Eliot says. Quentin does, as much as he can in the fading twilight. When his eyes adjust, when he masters the distinctive shape of Eliot's long face bending toward him in the darkness, he finds himself – unraveling just a bit. In a good way. This whole thing is a clusterfuck, but Quentin  _knows_ this face, and he's....

He's missed Eliot so much. Every goddamn day, even though he hasn't said that to anyone. He knows that whining about it doesn't help; all it would do is make Quentin feel like a whiner.

“Are you with me?” Eliot asks. He's laughing a little at Quentin, like this is an overreaction, and it's – obnoxious. But good. But  _Eliot_ . Quentin nods, and Eliot nods back approvingly and brushes his fingertips above Quentin's ear. “We have to eat. We have to sleep. I don't think these are bold claims.”

“You're right,” Quentin says. “Yeah, I – It's getting late, I know.”

They both turn to look at the – cottage? Cabin? Shack? It's cramped and dingy, with vines growing up over the face of it like it's been abandoned for years, even though – well, that guy who stormed off when they showed up, he must have been inside it, right? Like, living there? That's the only thing that makes sense, except Quentin doesn't understand why the damn thing looks basically haunted, if it's a real house that people are supposed to...live in.

He glances up at Eliot, and even in the moonlight he can see that Eliot's jaw is set hard, that he's gathering himself all over again to make the best of things. “Handy that the quest comes with free real estate,” he says.

Quentin laughs. It's not funny – nothing here is funny – but he kind of can't help it. “It's no Whitespire.”

“Well, Whitespire was not an  _unmitigated_ paradise, as it turns out,” Eliot says. A little sigh escapes him before he  _straightens his tie_ , and Quentin has to clamp his jaw down on another semi-hysterical laugh. Eliot Waugh, ladies and gentlemen. “Shall we investigate our new summer home?” he says, offering Quentin his arm.

Quentin takes it, and something warm washes over him – not the boiling heat of frustration and impending panic, but something almost – nostalgic. The last place he moved into with Eliot was Whitespire, and the place before that was the Physical Kids' cottage, and – third time's a charm, isn't it? Isn't that how the stories always go?

“Well, this is at least a little bit charming,” Eliot says, with obvious effort, as he investigates the round-bodied fireplace in the middle of the cabin, now glowing merrily after he threw out a tut so quick-moving that the motion barely caught the corner of Quentin's eye in the dark. Eliot circles it, his palm brushing the stonemasonry, and then he crouches to the straw-covered floor to get a better look inside. “Warming rack,” he says, as if to himself. “Hot water for tea. Warm bread in the morning. Cozy.”

“Yeah, great,” Quentin says. “Do you know how to cook on something like this?”

The red firelight catches Eliot's indulgent smile. “It's not a cookstove, Q,” he says. “You'd overheat a little place like this running a wood stove. There's probably a separate kitchen outside, under a shelter or in a second building.”

“Thanks, Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Quentin grumbles, which is extra shitty since Eliot was just answering his question.

Probably what Eliot is thinking right now is,  _literally the worst person to be stuck out here with is Quentin Coldwater_ . Probably Eliot's not wrong.

It's not any less dingy on the inside than on the outside, but the right-hand wall is mostly counter space, and there's food – flatbread tied up in a sack and half a wheel of cheese and a bowl full of slightly overripe peaches and another sack full of – maybe walnuts? There's a hammer and a small pick next to the nuts, and a thin layer of shattered shells, so whoever the last Mosaic quester was, he doesn't seem to have been very focused on housekeeping.

There's a table, but no chairs. There are plates in cabinets, and when Eliot moves a curtain on the left-hand wall aside, he finds what's actually a not-insubstantial pantry full of jarred grains and smoked fish and bunches of dried herbs and, a little too much to Eliot's delight, a barrel of wine.

There's a bed, but only one, and it's small. It's not even really Eliot-sized, let alone Quentin-and-Eliot sized, even if – bed-sharing was a theoretical option, which Quentin is desperately pretending it's not, because –  _come on_ , you know? He knows a quest involves hardship, but nobody in the world is dogged enough to--

It's such bullshit. Their friendship barely weathered the last time they woke up in bed together, and Quentin will be  _damned_ if he's going to let this fucking quest stir up more romantic drama in his life just for shits and giggles. They are better than this.

But there aren't any chairs, so for the moment they sit side-by-side on the bed, devouring crumbly lox-like sandwiches, drinking watery wine out of mugs with hands that are dangerously slippery from the gushing peaches. It's the best meal Quentin's ever had in his life, as it always is, if you let yourself get hungry enough.

“That's kind of ominous,” Eliot says, gesturing toward the back door, which is barred in iron and has a sharp axe hanging in the center of it.

“It's for chopping wood,” Quentin says.

“Yeah, it's for chopping wood right up until there's a Red Riding Hood situation to deal with,” Eliot says. “I'm just saying, there's a reason cabin-in-the-woods is a horror movie standard.”

“We're Magicians,” Quentin reminds him. “Melee combat with talking wolves is, like – let's make that our option of last resort, okay?”

Eliot chuckles softly and shifts further back on the bed so he can lean against the wall. Quentin's eyes have adjusted fully to the firelight now, and he watches Eliot out of the corner of his eye. In spite of his infuriating composure all day long, he's starting to look a little frayed around the edges, tired and tense, and Quentin flounders for something to say, for a way to hold up his end by offering something reassuring.

Optimism is not Quentin's natural state. He's got nothing.

“I wonder who hung the curtains,” Eliot says.

“Huh?”

Eliot gestures toward the front door. There are small windows on each side, and they're both hung with thin white curtains. “I can confidently say that this place has never known the loving touch of an interior decorator, so.... It seems odd, that's all.”

“For privacy, I guess,” Quentin says.

“All the way out here? There's nothing around for miles.”

Terrifying thought. “Well, there must be something,” Quentin says. “You'd just.... There'd have to be.” Wouldn't there?

“Oh, probably,” Eliot says off-handedly, like it's no big deal. “As close as we were to Whitespire when we came through the clock, we couldn't have gotten  _that_ far on foot. A city needs land and labor force quite a ways around it in every direction to feed itself. There must be a quaint little farming village in the area.”

It comes as a relief. Quentin doesn't think he's a complete snob about city living, but he's East-Coast enough that there's something fundamentally terrifying about the idea of having to go full Swiss Family Robinson. If there's someplace they can go for – supplies and whatever, then that's another matter. That's doable.

The cabin is lit cheerily in red-gold from the sizzling, banked fire, but Quentin is still terribly aware that it's night outside. He can hear owls, and – the wind in the trees. He's almost completely positive it's the wind in the trees, or maybe in the thatching of the roof, but at any rate almost definitely wind. Quentin finds himself glancing over at Eliot again and again, just – reassuring himself. If Eliot looks calm, then this can't be so bad. Eliot would know, right? He grew up on a farm, he knows what kind of country noises are normal.

Quentin feels – God, so ashamed of how he – how he acted earlier. Like Eliot's ability to stay calm under pressure was some kind of slight against Quentin, like an annoyance. Quentin knows he was just being bitterly jealous, knows that, as usual, he was just – wishing he had more of what Eliot has.

God knows Eliot has his issues, but he doesn't just fall apart the minute he's out of his element. He straightens his tie and tackles the problem – ever the self-made man. High King in his blood.

That's not ever, not ever in a billion years, going to be Quentin. And he's – fine with that. He figures things out, most of the time. He muddles through. But still, a lot of the time he wishes....

Well, there's something special about Eliot, you can't deny that. Ever the self-made man. High King in his blood. Envy is a pretty reasonable reaction. Quentin is man enough to admit that he's always been...envious, when it comes to Eliot. Among other things.

“So we should probably – talk about the Mosaic, right?” Quentin suggests, because if he brings anything at all to the table, it's going to have to be perseverance. “We should go into this with a plan.”

“What kind of plan do you have in mind?” Eliot says. If there were more energy behind his voice, he'd sound almost scornful.

“Well, we need to keep records for sure,” Quentin says. “Come up with a notation system so we can keep track of what we've already tried. We don't have time to repeat ourselves.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Eliot says. “Time seems like the one thing we have in glorious abundance. But yes, yes, records. Point well-taken. If we had records of what the last noble quester's failures, think how ahead of the curve we'd be right from the start.”

Quentin would rather not think about it, actually. The reality is, they don't have that. “It's our quest,” he says softly. “We do it ourselves. Right?” Eliot nods. “So do you have any...ideas?”

At first Eliot doesn't respond; he might even be falling asleep, the shadows of his eyelashes fluttering along his cheeks. Just when Quentin is gearing up to check up on him, Eliot finally says, “About the Mosaic specifically?”

“Yeah, I thought – um, you know, you have – kind of a pre-existing interest in, like, beauty? Or, I mean, at least more of an aesthetic sense than I do.”

“Q,” he says with a faint smile, “are you asking me to define the beauty of all life for you?”

“I mean, not  _here and now_ ,” Quentin says defensively. “I just thought it was, like. A conversation we could open. Look, our other option is just working it like a math problem, and you didn't like that idea the first time, so. So if you want to go a different direction, I'm listening.”

Eliot hums and starts to work the knot open on his tie. “Art is subjective,” he says. “And unfortunately I have no special insight into what magic keys find beautiful. I suppose – balanced proportions, typically. Symmetry. Color theory might....” He trails off after he's pulled the tie through his collar, and he looks down at his own hands, wrapping the tie around his knuckles as if the process intrigues him. “I'm sorry,” he finally says. “I'm – tired, I guess. It's an interesting question; I'll think about it.”

“ _I'm_ sorry,” Quentin blurts out. “I mean. For the way I acted earlier. That was – really childish, and. If we're going to get through this, we have to be a team. We're both going to be frustrated and restless a lot, so just – let's make sure we're not taking it out on each other, okay?”

“I didn't mind it,” Eliot says, and he sounds a little puzzled with himself, before his head tilts a little against the wall, toward Quentin's head. “It's...a reminder that you're real. A real person. When we're apart, I tend to remember a more – rose-colored version of you. But we're not apart now, and you're – the real you, with all that entails.”

“So you're calling me difficult?” Quentin interprets.

Eliot smiles. “Spunky.”

Quentin doesn't think he's ever rolled his eyes so hard in his entire life, but whatever. Eliot's not mad, and that's what matters. “I'm glad you're here,” Quentin says. “Doing this by myself.... There's no way. I just couldn't.”

“Well, you don't know that, but I agree it would be a demoralizing task for any one person to face alone. So. Teamwork.”

“Teamwork,” Quentin agrees.

Refreshed and refortified, they venture out the back door, Eliot's magical light bobbling along ahead of them. There are outbuildings, or – Quentin guesses they qualify as buildings. A chicken coop, he thinks one of them is, and one's definitely an outhouse, and then there's a shelter with a big stove and a water pump and – a round thing, a smoker maybe? God, Quentin doesn't even know what half of this is for, he's going to be even more useless than usual here.

There's a big pile of split wood; some of it's in log form, presumably for the stove and the fireplace, but some of it looks like it's reclaimed from some old project that required long boards. Eliot kicks it with the toe of his boot, and it thunks solidly. Not rotten. “You know what we could do?” he says. “Build a folding ladder with a platform. Whoever's sitting on top of it will have the perfect aerial view of the Mosaic, and I think being able to see it from there as well as from ground level might yield some interesting insights, artistically speaking.”

“Do we...know how to do that?” Quentin says dubiously.

“Darling, even you can hammer a nail,” Eliot says, and he already sounds a little tired of Quentin's bullshit, or – or maybe just amused. Maybe Quentin's reading too much into the tone. Maybe he's not fucking it up yet – is he fucking it up yet? “I saw some tools in the storage nook inside,” Eliot continues. “I don't know about nails, but if there aren't any new ones, we could probably pull apart the chicken coop for materials, given that we don't seem to have any chickens.”

“Or – you said there had to be a town, right? We'll have to go there for supplies; the food won't last forever.”

“True,” Eliot says, still distractedly kicking over wood and eyeing its dimensions as the globe light hovers helpfully. “Surely our services as  _classically trained_ Magicians of moderate accomplishment should be worth something in trade.”

God, if Dean Fogg could see them now. Which he can't, because won't be born for another, God, Quentin doesn't know. Fifty years? They should work out the timeline at some point. But not tonight. “Or we could be overthinking it,” Quentin says. He doesn't sound very convincing, even to himself. “We could finish tomorrow.”

“Hmm,” Eliot says.

He doesn't bother to say  _that's not how quests work_ . He doesn't have to.

They take turns washing up out back, running the pump until the stone basin under it is full and taking off their shirts to clean off at least the outermost layer of dirt. At least, when it's Quentin's turn he just removes his sweatshirt and t-shirt; he gives Eliot privacy, so he doesn't actually know if Eliot does the same thing, or if he's more thorough – if he takes off –

Holy shit, it is  _the first day_ , and Quentin is already--

It's not even about – not mostly about – he's just – missed Eliot. He's missed Eliot so fucking much, and every time they hug it's like remembering how to breathe, and that's. Why Quentin's got his wires all crossed, probably. Why his rotting, moth-eaten brain is choosing not to remember that there are reasons, very sound and good reasons, why Quentin and Eliot are platonic friends,  _brothers_ practically.

Well, one reason anyway, but it's  _sound_ and  _good_ . The reason is that in his entire life, Quentin has never solved a problem by seeing someone naked; he's only ever managed to create more. And Eliot is too – special for Quentin to allow him to become a problem. Quentin needs him too much, right where he is.

Now more than ever.

So Quentin doesn't let himself look too carefully when Eliot comes back inside and bars the back door, doesn't see where the collar of his shirt clings to his neck, or if there are still visible drops of water at the hollow of his throat. Yeah, okay, Eliot is – how he is, tall and slinky and elegant and confident, and it's  _earned_ confidence, too. Quentin knows all that – knew it even before he  _knew_ it, knew it Biblically. So what? Quentin's used to wanting what he can't have. It's oddly comforting by now. Feels just like home.

Eliot crouches by the fire and uses the heavy towels there to maneuver a kettle of water onto the warming rack, then pokes at the fire with a long iron fork, turning over the wood as it reduces to – what do you call that? Not ash. Not coal. Embers?

Jesus fucking Christ. Quentin has a BA from Columbia, and he's barely qualified to own and operate a  _fireplace_ . This is a nightmare. He's just – he's going to have to take on most of the Mosaic planning and execution, since he's so badly unequipped to do anything else. That's the way that it's most fair to Eliot.

When the kettle boils, Eliot pours water into mugs for both of them, then adds a palmful of dried leaves from the pantry into each cup. “Wait, do you know what that is?” Quentin says.

“Some kind of mint,” Eliot says.

“How can you be sure?”

Eliot turns his head, looking back over his shoulder at Quentin, curled around his knees in the middle of the uncomfortable straw-stuffed bed. “Because I know what mint smells like?” he drawls like Quentin is – exactly the idiot that Quentin is. But he smiles when he says it, too.

“I'm just saying, Fillorian herbalism isn't one of your special skills, as far as I'm aware,” Quentin grumbles as Eliot comes over to hand him one of the cups. It does smell like peppermint. It's probably peppermint.

“What, are you afraid to drink an unknown substance handed to you by a strange man?” Eliot teases. He taps his mug against Quentin's, but he doesn't drink immediately. He just swishes it around, holding it between his hands to watch the tea leaves settle.

“Like you're above spiking my drink,” Quentin snorts.

“I've never,” Eliot says. “Well. Not yours  _individually_ .” He stretches out his legs, which are vastly longer than the bed is wide, and he toes his boots off, one after the other. He's wearing ordinary black socks. Quentin's not sure why that feels surprising, but it does. It's so...mundane, and it feels strangely intimate, to be allowed to see the plainest, most nondescript layer of King Eliot the Spectacular, first of his name.

Like this, in plain dark socks and plain dark pants and a blue shirt with the sleeves unbuttoned, he looks – just – like just a man. And Quentin knows that's all he is, but he doesn't always  _look_ it. That's the thing.

“So, um,” Quentin says. “What's – what's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?”

Eliot smiles into his cup. “What a fascinating question. I don't know. There's – so much. The beauty of all life.... It's a fairly dense topic.”

“Well, try,” Quentin says. “It's just a conversation, it's not a quiz.”

“Why don't you start?” Eliot says. “Give me a minute to collect my thoughts.”

Should have seen that coming, he guesses. “The thing is,” Quentin says slowly. “The thing is, I don't...always think in, in pictures. I tend to be a little more – abstract. So when I think about what's beautiful, I guess I think of...ideas. Concepts.”

“Give me a for-instance,” Eliot says.

“Well, like.... Courage. Friendship. Love. Things like that. I mean, I think that's what – really makes life beautiful, isn't it? That, that capacity that people have to – value things that are bigger than themselves. To assign meaning to the meaningless. To find hope in the darkness. To sacrifice for the people they love. I don't know what that looks like in, like, Mosaic terminology, but – isn't that the beauty of life?”

Eliot nods slowly. “It's – a kind of beauty, I suppose. Sure.”

“Your turn. Come on, you're not wedded to it forever, just – whatever comes to mind first.”

“I can tell you...the first memory I have of finding something beautiful.” Something about the soft rasp of Eliot's voice, or just the topic itself – Eliot never talks about his childhood, or almost never – raises the hairs on the back of Quentin's arms a little. He nods his encouragement. “My parents had this – set of crystal stemware. It was a wedding gift, I think. And all year, they sat in the china cabinet, except maybe three or four times a year, we'd get them out and use them on the table – Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, and maybe if we were having important company for Sunday dinner. And I remember how heavy they were, these big – goblet-shaped water glasses – we used them for water, anyway – and how the way they were cut meant that if you held them up to the light, they'd throw rainbows on the wall like a prism. I loved them. Just – the way they fit in your hands when you'd cup them, and the colors, and how – pure they looked. Clean. I thought they were, like – diamonds or something. I remember asking my mother why we couldn't use them all the time, and she thought it was the most ludicrous thing she'd ever heard. She told me – they were special. For special occasions. And I remember thinking – how wrong that felt. How sad. To own something so beautiful and get so little pleasure from it, just in the name of specialness. I thought...when I was older, when I had my own home, I would have...nothing but beautiful things, and I'd use them every day. That everything I had would be beautiful.”

Quentin can't help looking around the shadowy, colorless cabin, all straw and stone and unpolished wood. “This must be killing you,” he says.

It's meant to be a little funny and mostly sympathetic, but – it's the wrong thing to say. Eliot scowls down at his brownish-gray clay mug of tea, and the firelight chases weary anger and something else across his face – something hauntingly sad. “Actually,” he says, the sharp, clipped tone of his speech completely mismatched with his expression, “you might be surprised. As much as I do realize I look like a soft, fluttery little aesthete who's never done real work in his life, I am significantly  _harder to kill_ than people assume.”

“I-- God, Eliot, you know that's not-- I don't think you look – anything like that, that's not what I meant at all.” It was so  _beyond_ the wrong thing to say. Quentin could just-- God, _fuck._ Why is he  _like_ this?

Eliot sighs and runs a hand through his messy curls. “I know. Sorry, I.... That wasn't aimed at you, actually.”

“I'm sorry,” Quentin says.

“Don't be.” Eliot straightens his shoulders and rolls his neck. He pats Quentin's knee twice, almost absently, and stands up – and up, and up. Even in his sock feet, Eliot towers over the world. Even when he's not the tallest thing in the room by far, he towers.

“Whitespire,” Quentin blurts out. Eliot half-turns curiously to look down at Quentin, folded up on the low-framed bed. “I think-- The first time I saw Whitespire, it was. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. And I know it's – problematic. But I still feel something when I see it. I guess I always will.”

Eliot smiles softly at him. “We'll throw a party like you've never seen in your life, when you come back.”

That sounds – terrible, but Quentin smiles and nods anyway. It's Eliot being Eliot.

A faded quilt covers the bed, but there's a mossy-green, knitted blanket draped over the foot, and Eliot picks it up and flips it over his arm with a flourish. “It's stuffy enough in here without trying to fit two people, and the weather's nice outside. I can sleep under the stars.”

“That seems....” Quentin doesn't know what it seems. Wrong? He doesn't have a better idea. The floor would be less comfortable, and trying to jam both of them in the bed just – doesn't make sense on any level at all. “Are you sure? We can – trade off tomorrow night.”

“We'll see,” Eliot says. “We don't have to make plans too far in advance just yet. After all, we could be finished tomorrow.”

Quentin smiles, and it's all a weight in his chest, but a good, warm weight like quilts and warm mugs of tea: Eliot Waugh and his steadiness, his guiding hand drawing Quentin painlessly closer to the work at hand. Eliot Waugh and his cozy, comforting lies.

“Could be,” Quentin agrees.


	2. One Month

“Here's the plan,” Eliot says, the third time that Quentin swears far more inventively than Eliot previously thought him capable of and throws a tile fifteen yards downwind. “You have to sit down. You have to calm down. Try breathing, it's free opium.”

“You're not funny,” Quentin says.

“Fine,” Eliot says, dropping a plum from his high seat atop the ladder. Quentin catches it reflexively, then scowls at it. “Because I'm actually being serious. It's a fine line between _impassioned_ and _intolerable_ , and I think you know which side of it you're on right now.”

Quentin does know, and Eliot knows he knows. He lies down in the grass on the other side of the Mosaic, his arms crossed over his stomach as he gazes at the slow-rolling summer clouds. A butterfly lands briefly on his knee, but he doesn't seem to notice. Quentin is oblivious to a lot of things lately – more things than usual, even.

“You don't understand,” Quentin says. His voice cracks a little. He's spread so thin lately; he's driving himself so relentlessly, as if he could compress a thousand statistical zeros into a few heroic hours, or maybe at most a few weeks.

Eliot's not a math genius, but he can do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations. They're not going home this week, or the next. Not unless they have the kind of wild, creative breakthrough that Quentin is actively making far _less_ likely by driving both of them batshit insane.

“I do understand,” Eliot says. “You think I don't miss – everything? Everyone? I understand. But burning yourself out won't get us home any faster and you know it.”

“Everything's going to shit, and we're not even there to – to do anything about it,” Quentin says.

And, funny thing. “No,” Eliot says. “Would you just – think? Think it through. Nothing is going to shit right now, not for anyone we know, because no one we know will be _born_ for another hundred years. We have time.”

“Time,” Quentin repeats, and there's a soft, yearning note in his voice that makes Eliot feel like – yes, good. Like he might finally be _getting_ it.

“When we solve the Mosaic,” Eliot says, “and we get the Key, we'll go back to our own time. You'll go get your girl; I'll go save mine. We'll do – everything that needs to be done. We always do. They won't even know we were gone.”

“If it works that way,” Quentin says. “How do we know for sure that it works that way?”

 _Because I want it to_ , is the real answer. Eliot doesn't think it's going to satisfy Quentin, or any sane person. “Well, if it doesn't, then we're already boned,” he says. “Either way, there's really no rush.”

It makes Quentin laugh. Every now and then – even here and even now – Quentin does that. That's good, right? As long as he can still laugh at their fucked-up lives, then he won't-- then he isn't-- Then he can manage. With Eliot to drag him through by the ear, Quentin can manage.

That's the plan, anyway.

For a minute everything is quiet, except for the hum of grasshoppers and the creak of the ladder as Eliot leans back and crosses his legs. It's almost as if Quentin has decided to take the nap he so desperately needs, but then he says, “Okay, the thing is, though--”

“I will throw more plums,” Eliot threatens. It's a lie; he's out of plums. “I will throw them right at your face.”

Quentin smiles with his eyes closed, but he can't be stopped. It's Quentin's best and worst quality. “The thing is, you know a lot about a lot of things, but you know what _I_ know a lot about? _Fillory._ I know Fillory, El, and I know how magic works here. Things _mean_ things. Things want – magic wants-- Okay, it's like, the Mosaic is in pieces, right? But what if – sometimes the thing about broken-up things is that they, they want to be whole again, in a way, you know? So what if the Mosaic, what if it – kind of needs – help? Like, it's only going to be solved if it knows, or if the _magic_ knows that we. That we care. That we're really trying.”

“Magic is in no position to ask me for favors right now,” Eliot says. It makes Quentin frown, and Eliot relents with a little sigh, as he always seems to. “I _don't_ care,” he says. “But you do, and – if that counts for anything, then I'm sure the Mosaic – appreciates the effort. But if it doesn't want you to exercise appropriate self-care as well, then it's not your real friend.”

“You're making fun of me,” Quentin says, but his frown has softened. He's not smiling, but the potential is there. “Look, I know at home it would be a ridiculous thing to say, but. It's Fillory. The rules are different here.”

And he is most certainly not wrong about that. “You can care without killing yourself,” Eliot says.

He regrets his choice of words right away. Quentin's theoretical smile recedes further into the distance. “That's not what I'm doing,” he says quietly.

“Oh, I know,” Eliot says. “Not on my fucking watch.”

“You're not the High King anymore,” Quentin says. “Or, I mean – yet. You don't just get to declare things, that's my point.”

“Watch me,” Eliot says. It makes Quentin smile, finally – his third real smile today.

Eliot should probably stop keeping count of those. It's borderline creepy.

Eliot should probably stop doing a lot of things, but he's not going to. Why would he, after all? For his _health?_ God forbid.

Arielle is not, as Eliot originally hoped, a balm for Quentin's spirit, but she's damned handy around the kitchen. “Don't you have a job?” he asks her after a couple of weeks of daily visits, as she helps him sort through the onions down in cold storage (apparently there's a cold storage shelter on their property; Eliot may not be a High King anymore, but the quest seems to have arranged for him to inherit quite the estate to manage).

“I work in my family's orchard,” Arielle says, chucking two more mushy onions into the wheelbarrow to be hauled out. “But they don't mind. I just tell them how lovely you two are and what a hovel you live in, and they feel sorry for you.”

“Hey, now,” Eliot says. “ _Hovels_ don't have lace curtains.”

She's right though, it's awful. Eliot doesn't know how Quentin sleeps inside the place – _sober_ , no less. It smells like Eliot remembers the barn at home smelling, like damp hay and sawdust and sweat and misery.

Still, things are...coming along. Arielle helps; she knows vastly more than Eliot about homesteading, for obvious reasons, but she even helps him unlock the things he does already know, just by being someone to talk out loud to. It organizes Eliot's thoughts, and his priorities, and he can't talk to Quentin about cheesecloth and tallow and seasoning the cast iron, because it – upsets him.

Quentin still doesn't like to admit that they live here now. He throws himself into the Mosaic while Eliot and Arielle scrub and mend and sort. He locks himself into himself, which Eliot can't relate to at all. What does Quentin do all day while he shuffles around in circles, laying tile after tile – _think thoughts_? Unbelievable. A fate worse than death.

“He's not always like this,” Eliot tries to tell her. “He's going through some things.”

“Is that what the quest is for?” Arielle asks softly, brushing the curtains aside with her fingertips to peek out the window at Quentin, perched on his toes at the top of their platform, ticking something off on his fingertips as he stares down at the Mosaic. “Will it – is it to heal him?”

That scrapes something inside Eliot, like a fingernail catching in his soft flesh as something tries to crawl out. “I hope so,” he says.

They're here for a Key to Greater Magic, not for Quentin's self-actualization, but-- Is it so wrong to hope that some personal benefit might accrue to the questers? Fortune favors the bold, doesn't it?

A little favoritism wouldn't go amiss around here. That's all Eliot is saying. Isn't their luck due to change any day now?

They've cleared the firepit in the front yard, and Eliot and Quentin spend every night in its light, drinking wine and toasting cheese under the Fillorian stars. For those last hours of the day, Eliot almost manages to believe that he's where he wants to be.

“Let's have a dinner party,” Eliot says, and Quentin starts to laugh so hard he almost chokes on his wine. It would be insulting, except that it's the first time Quentin has laughed in days, so whatever, Eliot can take it. “I am insulted,” he says.

“No, I just, it's so – you. You want to throw a party? _Here?_ ”

“Yes, I do,” Eliot says. “Arielle says if you jump that broken fence way back at the north end of the field and go straight down the hill, there's a bend in the river, an old ford. Slow, shallow water, and it's a nesting colony for ducks. I was thinking it would be the easiest thing in the world to paralyze a duck with magic. Then you wring its neck, boil it, clean it--”

“Okay, you make that sound very easy, but I bet it's not,” Quentin says.

“Oh, ye of little faith. I used to hunt, you know. I can dress a kill.”

Quentin pulls off his sweatshirt and folds it up for a pillow so he can lie back. “You used to hunt _when_?”

“When I was younger,” Eliot says. “Trust me, not by choice. Do you like coq au vin? Or, I suppose, canard au vin. It probably tastes the same. Or close enough.”

“And then we serve it to – who? Where?”

“Arielle and Lunk, obviously. Do you realize how many things they've collected for us in town and hauled up here? It wouldn't kill us to show some gratitude.”

Quentin, who obviously had not realized, switches gears suddenly from scornful to puzzled as he mentally tallies up the canisters of milk and new blankets and seedlings and venison jerky and jars of soap have spontaneously appeared in their lives lately. “Do we – are we paying them for any of that? We talked about trading spells--”

“The last guy did that, apparently,” Eliot tells him. “Rather unsavory spells, to be honest; he had a bit of a reputation for providing seduction charms and amulets to help you cheat at cards.” Quentin grimaces. “But no, I haven't been playing Wicked Witch behind your back. They're keeping us in gingerbread for free.”

“Why?” Quentin asks.

“Pity,” Eliot says. “And...custom. There are questers up here on a regular basis, and it's just – always been done this way. I think it's the equivalent of a tourist attraction, basically? A point of interest for the town, that they have mysterious Magicians on pilgrimage.”

“Oh,” Quentin says. “Well, then. I guess we should – be appreciative. Do we have to invite Lunk, though?”

Eliot plucks the last wedge of toasted cheese off his skewer and blows on it briefly before passing it over to Quentin. “I know, he's _dire_ , isn't he?” Eliot says. “But yes, we do have to.”

“I don't know what she sees in him,” Quentin grumbles, dirty and rumpled, his mouth full of cheese, his nail beds stained with chalk, his hair snarled up around the only elastic hairband in all of Fillory.

“The heart wants what it wants,” Eliot says.

Quentin sleeps in the hovel. He says the bed is comfortable, once you get used to it.

Eliot sleeps outside, under the stars. It's a temporary fix; the late Fillorian summers are sultry but pleasant and the autumns, as Eliot recalls, are long and mild, but eventually they'll have to work something out.

Or they could be finished tomorrow, and Eliot will never have to wonder if sleeping in the snow is better or worse than the floor at Quentin Coldwater's feet. Reason suggests sleeping in the snow is obviously untenable. Pride, however....

Eliot is still allowed to have a _little_ pride, isn't he?

Quentin is teaching him the names of Fillorian constellations; apparently there were astronomy books at Whitespire, and apparently Quentin read at least one of them. Night after night, they drink wine in the firelight, watching the twilight fall in gently descending bands of lavender and indigo, idly competing to be the first to notice the Dragon's Nose crest the treeline or the Dancing Slipper become visible overhead.

“What's your sign?” Eliot asks him.

“Earth astrology or Fillorian?” Quentin asks.

“Either. Both.”

“Cancer,” Quentin says.

Eliot ponders that a minute. “I don't know what that means,” he finally says. Water, right? The ocean, a concept that remains vaguely mystical and romantic to Eliot, even after putting six years' worth of distance between himself and Indiana.

Quentin gestures vaguely in the air. From Eliot's angle on his back, it looks like Quentin's fingertips are trailing stars. “Moody. Clingy. Anxious.”

“Well, you should go by your Fillorian sign, then,” Eliot says.

“I don't know what that is,” Quentin admits. “Anyway, it probably sucks, too.” Because nobody knows how to spoil a lovely night like Quentin Coldwater.

Sometimes Eliot really doesn't know what he sees in the man.

Eliot's first pickling project is radishes, and he's surprised by how strong the taste is, peppery and sour and – well, it's just not what he expected. That's fine, he's still learning.

He makes Quentin close his eyes at dinner and pops one of them into Quentin's mouth. The face Quentin makes his genuinely hilarious.

“Holy shit, did you make this?” Quentin says, once he's crunched it down enough to make room for words in his mouth. “Oh my god, Eliot, this is so good? How much did you make, let me see the jar.”

Quentin eats damn near an entire jar before bedtime, and he smiles every time he sucks the juice from his fingers. He closes his eyes like it makes his sense of taste sharper.

“What would I do without you?” Quentin says.

“Nibble wanly on bark and cry a lot,” Eliot says, and Quentin laughs and licks the salty rim of the pickling jar like it's a margarita.

Looking back, Eliot thinks that even though they were sitting at the table and bench overlooking the Mosaic, it might be the first time both of them forgot at the same time that their whole lives were supposed to revolve around this punishingly impossible task. Looking back, he thinks – just for a minute that first time, but for a minute, they weren't Kings or Magicians or questers. They were just two people happy to be eating radishes together under the stars.

“I've been thinking about the beauty of all life,” Eliot says when the moment passes.

“Yeah?” Quentin says. “Anything interesting?”

“My every thought is _scintillating_ ,” Eliot says. Quentin's only response is an indulgent smile, so Eliot forges ahead. “It seems pointless, not to mention impossible, to generate a list of all the beautiful things that exist. That's not-- That's thinking too small, right? It's not the beauty _in_ life, it's the beauty _of_ life. The beauty that constitutes life. Foundational principles of beauty.”

“I think I took that as a humanities elective,” Quentin says wryly.

Eliot doesn't dignify that with a response. “So what makes beautiful things beautiful? I've been thinking about that, and I think it's – contrast. Music is defined by silence as much as sound; art is all about negative space. It's like-- Think about the stars. They're out all the time, but when the sky is light, there's not enough contrast to see them. It's only when the canvas goes dark that you get a starry sky – what we think of as a starry sky.”

Quentin drums his fingers on the edge of the table while he thinks about that. Finally he nods. “So if you're right, what's the – fundamental contrast, in life? What's the negative space that creates the beauty of all life?”

“I'm still working on that,” Eliot admits.

“Longing?” Quentin says, which sends a slight, guilty jolt through Eliot. He swats it away ruthlessly. “We know we're in the presence of something beautiful because we've experienced being without it, right? Otherwise it's water to the fish. So maybe it's...the contrast between what we want and what we have.”

“Maybe,” Eliot says. “I don't know. Longing feels a little.... Overrated.”

Quentin shrugs and pours himself another cup of wine. When he realizes he's emptied the wineskin, he adds a little from his cup into Eliot's, for fairness' sake. “Is it just...knowing that it's all finite?” he says quietly. “Being and – and nonbeing, is that the contrast?”

“You have the _bleakest_ sense of aesthetics,” Eliot accuses.

“Yeah,” Quentin admits. “Sorry about that; it's been a long month.”

Rather than just criticize, Eliot determines to come up with something better. It takes him a few minutes, but they're in no hurry. “What about-- I can't believe I'm saying this,” he sighs. “If life is basically just the story we tell ourselves about what life is, then maybe we should be thinking about literature more than visual art – or if not _literature,_ per se, then at least the basic structure of a satisfying story.”

“Are you flirting with me right now?” Quentin asks with a lopsided grin, as if he himself has not been sitting here _sucking his fingers_ for what feels like days.

“I think you'll _know_ when I'm flirting,” Eliot says tartly. “But yes, I'm doing the Hero's Journey thing, so please, try to control yourself. So you start at a certain point of familiarity, and then something changes--”

“The call to adventure,” Quentin murmurs.

“And then – action. Quests, magic. Twists and turns, death-defying escapes. You go through hell--”

“To the Underworld,” Quentin says.

“Do you mind if I finish a thought?” Quentin holds up his hands in apology. “But at the end, the story isn't really complete without a homecoming, right? Because it isn't actually beautiful or satisfying if it's just endless. The adventure matters, but having – someplace to belong at the end of it, that matters, too. And maybe – that's the beauty of life?”

“Mordor, but also the Shire,” Quentin says. His eyes are shining in the low light of the indigo hour, like he's discovered something – beautiful. “It's not just that they both matter; it's that they _make_ each other. Both of them mean something because they aren't the other one. And life-- even if you don't go on adventures proper, we're all kind of looking for that balance, right? A life that's partially familiar and partially surprising. Eliot, that's – Jesus, that's good.”

“Better than the radishes?” he asks.

Quentin smiles at him and says, “Let's not go overboard.”

Eliot has never belonged anywhere in his life more than he belonged at the end of a bridge of rainbow flowers, kneeling at Quentin Coldwater's feet while he held a crown between his hands and said, _For what it's worth, I think you are going to be a really good king._

Eliot has never been more surprised in his life than he was tangled up in Egyptian cotton sheets with Quentin's hands wrapped firmly around his arms, Quentin's warm chest pressed against his, skin-to-skin, while Quentin lifted his mouth away from Eliot's neck long enough to say in a whiskey-scorched rasp of a voice, _Show me, show me what you like, Eliot._

Quentin Coldwater is the biggest and most beautiful thing in Eliot's life. He shines infinitely brighter and more constant above Eliot's head than the Dancing Slipper, but honestly until this quest, Eliot doesn't think he ever bothered to ask himself why. It seems like – maybe that's why, though.

The contrast.

Everyone is very polite about Eliot's canard au vin. Arielle promises to teach him how to fry a duck, for next time.

While they're eating, a flock of birds passes overhead, darkening the sky briefly. “Rain tomorrow!” they yell, over and over. “Before dawn, rain! Rain tomorrow!”

“Oh, good,” Arielle says. “I don't know what's been taking them so long, they know what happens if they schedule the rains too late to make the grapes ripen.”

“The cost of wine goes up?” Eliot guesses.

“That and another coup at Whitespire,” Lunk grumbles. “I'm so sick of politics.”

Eliot debuts his first cocktail at the party, a combination of Lunk's very worst grain alcohol and a syrup Eliot has been carefully nurturing for days, a blend of apple cider and maple syrup and peach puree. It suffers artistically from the limitations of Eliot's flavor palette, but it earns Eliot a lot of compliments and it gets everyone drunk, so two out of three ain't bad.

“See, we have to...” Quentin tries explaining around the fire as the Dragon's Nose comes nipping close to the heel of the Slipper. “It's about, um, it's like – beauty? All beauty, the, the beauty of all life, so. That's. It has to be, like. Big, you know? It's. Big.”

Arielle nods earnestly at him from the chair where she sits on Lunk's mighty thigh. “Where did it come from?” she asks. From Quentin's face, he's never considered that question any more than Eliot has. “I mean, who – who made the Mosaic?”

“I don't know,” Quentin says. “Magic, I guess? Who makes any of this stuff up?”

“I should ask the Great Cock,” Eliot says. “Next time I see him.”

There's a pause, and then Lunk starts to bellow with laughter. “Lunk, stop,” Arielle giggles, hitting him in the tit with the back of her hand. “Don't embarrass me.”

Still laughing, Lunk says, “Me? He's the one who said he was gonna ask my--”

“ _Lunk!_ ” Arielle says in enough real panic that Lunk composes himself and ducks his head to show his obedience.

Whatever else you can say about Lunk – and Eliot could say plenty – he always seems to want to make Arielle happy. That's nice. That covers a multitude of sins, Eliot feels.

He says something to that effect to Quentin as they're washing dishes after the party. Quentin doesn't look convinced. “So he clears the lowest possible bar as a boyfriend,” Quentin grumbles. “Terrific, let's build him a statue.”

Eliot flicks a dishtowel lightly at Quentin's back. “She'll figure it out eventually.”

“Figure what out?” Quentin asks.

“That you're a better boyfriend,” Eliot says. “Oh, stop it with the face. It's just us, you don't have to pretend to be shocked.”

“No, I'm just – is this – have you been _matchmaking_ this whole time?” Quentin says. “Is that why you're always inviting her around?”

Eliot shrugs and heaves the heavy cookpot over to drain duck fat into the pan he'll use tomorrow to fry slices of corn mash for breakfast. “I invite her around because she's useful and I like her,” Eliot says. “But additionally, it just so happens that-- I think it's time, you know? I know that – that we're going back, but we could end up living a lot of time between now and then. I'm sure it's desperately romantic, keeping yourself pure and true for Alice, but. Q. It could be a _long_ time.”

Quentin scowls, squishing one of Eliot's floating lights in his fist with unnecessary vigor to dim the lights. “I don't – I'm not keeping – I don't want to talk about this, Eliot. And she has a boyfriend anyway.”

“Yeah, _Lunk_ ,” Eliot says scornfully.

Even though he can't quite stop himself from smiling, Quentin makes himself sound stern when he says, “Her boyfriend is _her_ boyfriend. You and I don't get to choose who she makes promises to, and I'm not going to-- I mean, as if I even could, because – obviously that's her type, and then there's me.”

“Trust me,” Eliot says, “she is going to get bored of fucking Lunk. The Lunks of the world are always boring, once you get the fucking out of your system.”

“Okay, can we not?” Quentin says tightly. “I don't wanna play this game, okay, Eliot? I'm not trying to – prove some kind of point about Alice, I just – really miss her, and it sucks being in this limbo where she's not even mine to miss. And actually, I honestly do really like Arielle, and it's not just fun party gossip – it's not a good time for me, having to think about--”

“Okay,” Eliot says, cutting Quentin off with a hand on his shoulder before he can really get himself worked up. “Okay, we won't talk about it anymore. I understand.”

Quentin lets a long breath out. He looks up at the stars, which are starting to vanish from the sky in entirely the wrong order as the rainclouds roll in. “You should bring your stuff inside,” he says quietly. “You can't sleep out in the rain, you'll ruin all your bedding.”

And as desperately as Eliot tries to find the flaw in that logic, it's fairly airtight, so that's what he does. He layers his blankets carefully between the bed ( _Quentin's bed_ ) and the fireplace, telling himself that really, it's the best spot in the house, the temperature nicely balanced between the cool ground beneath him and the warm kiss of the firelight on his face. If you ignore how much keener the scent of the straw is down here, it's...not bad.

“Are you sure you don't-- We could trade,” Quentin says as he climbs into bed. “I mean, I know you don't, you said you get – claustrophobic, but you're inside anyway? And I feel bad? There's no reason we can't trade off sometimes.”

“There's an excellent reason,” Eliot says. “The bed is shorter than I am.”

“Okay, it's probably not the world's most comfortable-- But it has to be better than the floor.”

“You can assume I'm perfectly fine unless I tell you otherwise,” Eliot says.

And all right, that's not – strictly true, but it's still a bit unnecessary, the way Quentin lets out a hard, cold burst of laughter. “You have a lot of talents, El,” he says, “but _self-disclosure_ is not one of them. God, sometimes I really wish....”

Eliot waits for a minute. He watches the embers sizzle in the fireplace. “Well, go ahead,” he finally says, trying not to sound too...sharp. “Don't stop there, what do you wish?”

“I just wish you'd talk to me,” Quentin says.

It's somehow not what Eliot expected – not the words, and not the smudges of sadness in Quentin's voice, any remaining urge to argue blurred by the late hour and the cocktails. “We talk all the time,” Eliot says. “Jesus, what is there to do up here _except_ talk to each other?”

“But not about.... Look, okay, I know you, El, I know this is – how you cope. You shove everything down except – except what you think fits the aesthetic, what makes you look like this I-woke-up-this-way, completely together person, you don't let the rest of it.... I get it. I know you.”

“Apparently so,” Eliot says flatly.

“I'm not trying to change you, and I'm not – trying to take away whatever sense of control you've managed to carve out for yourself, but sometimes – the way you cope, it makes it feel like you don't, like you don't – care. Like none of this matters, because you're just going to forge ahead regardless of setting or context, hosting dinner parties and making cocktails and being your own – _creative project_ or whatever, but it does – it _does_ matter, and I think you actually do know that it does, I think you're just. Bullshitting for the audience, which is your comfort-zone or whatever, but – when _I'm_ your only audience, it feels. I don't know, lonely. Like I have to carry all the – caring for both of us.” Eliot doesn't know what to say. Is he supposed to – prove that he cares? Promise to do better? He doesn't know what Quentin wants from him, because honestly – Quentin has never _wanted_ anything from him before. Eliot has always just been...acceptable to Quentin, without effort. He guesses it was stupid to think that would hold for the rest of their lives. “I would just...not feel so alone out here, I think, if you would-- I think if we're a team, you could – could try a little harder. To help with the quest. I know if you tried, you could--”

“Yeah, no, I couldn't,” Eliot says. “Even if I... That wouldn't work for me, actually. Trying.”

“ _Why not?_ ” Quentin says. “El, you are capable of so--”

“Because I'm gay, Quentin,” Eliot snaps.

That snuffs the conversation out instantly. Eliot knows it's only a temporary reprieve, but he takes advantage of it anyway, breathing steadily while the fire spits a stray spark upward. Eliot imagines it traveling up the chimney, being caught by the wind that rustles their thatching. Bobbling along through the dark sky like an escaping star. “I don't--” Quentin starts. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Eliot sighs and rolls over onto his back. “So you're eleven years old,” he begins. “Twelve years old. Sad, smart little Quentin, and it's just occurred to you that you're going to be a grown-up someday, whatever that means. You want to be good at it, or at least good at something, if you can't be good at everything. Maybe you want to be famous or special, have adventures or magic powers. And you want people to love you – preferably you want _everyone_ to love you, all the kids at school and your family and people you haven't even met yet, and you're starting to think that you _really_ want at least some of those people to touch your dick at some point. Welcome to your adolescence, Quentin Coldwater.”

Quentin snorts softly. “What's the opposite of nostalgia?” he asks, probably rhetorically.

“Ah, but here's the thing,” Eliot says. “You have all these questions about your future, but the world is right there, ready and more than willing to provide you all the answers. You're told all the time how to get the things you want. Be clever, be brave. Work hard. Practice. Never give up, never surrender. Show the world who you are, because all that potential and hope that you have in you, all that wanting? Those are good things. People want to see them – they want to see that you're a fierce competitor, that you win because you want it more than the other guy, that you'll keep improving because you _care_ so much. You'll win prizes. You'll be picked for teams. Your parents will be so proud of you. And maybe, if you're confident and determined enough, if you prove that you're committed and you care and you want it with everything you've got, maybe your best friend will wake up tomorrow and decide she's been in love with you all along. The world spins that story for eleven-or-twelve-year-old Quentin, every day. Maybe it's bullshit and maybe it's not, but you believe it. Fish and water. Do you think that's what I learned, Quentin, when I was eleven?”

Quentin doesn't answer. But honestly, how could he? “No,” Eliot continues, not without gentleness. There's no one to blame for this – no Beast, no Voldemort, no Lucifer the Fallen seducing the world from the path of righteousness, and certainly not an anxious kid from the Jersey suburbs. “You're not as naive as that. But maybe you don't – really know what kind of a story it was, that the world spun for me. I learned that if I wanted to be loved, I'd have to buy that with my silence. I learned that if I wanted to be important, _respected_ , I'd have to buy that with my loneliness. And as for that sweet love story, the playmate who turns into my lover if I'm good and true, if I _try hard enough_? Boys like me shed blood for aspiring above our station, darling. Boys like me can die for it. So now there's a quest to complete, and you want to be the hero who _cares_ and _tries_ and earns his reward and proves he was worthy all along? Good. I think you should. Your whole life has taught you the rules of heroism, so be the hero the world needs. My whole life has taught me about survival, so if you don't mind, I think what I'll do is make sure we don't starve to death this winter. And that's the plan.”

It's late now, and the wind that will blow the rains in before dawn is picking up, rattling the back door in its frame. Eliot closes his eyes and feels the rotten grain alcohol settle into vinegar at the bottom of his stomach. He hates it in this fucking hovel, hates the smell of the hay and the dingy, graying lace curtains that fail utterly to tie the room together, hates that he can cross every inch of it in three long strides from end to end.

Under the stars with a loaf of bread and a jug of wine, a low fire merrily illuminating the already warm night, and the man who won't ever know how he broke Eliot's heart, Eliot can almost believe that he's turning this little patch of abandoned ground into a home, but _this place_ , this place is irredeemable. He can't live in a cell like this, he can't _bear_ it.

“How are you, Eliot?” Eliot hears from the darkness. Quentin's voice is so low and tender, so kind. It's like light fingertips digging into Eliot's heart, shaking it gently to wake it up. And Eliot's heart – moves a little. Just a little. But it must mean the damn thing's not dead yet.

He swallows the sour drunkenness and the self-pity and the – fucking _longing_ – and he says, “Fine.”

“Okay,” Quentin says. Eliot didn't expect him to accept that. Eliot certainly didn't expect him to accept it with a soft, indulgent chuckle in his voice. “I think, uh, I think I just don't – ask you that often enough, so I'm going to. I'm going to ask more. And you can tell me the truth, or you can lie to me, or you can change the subject, or just. Whatever you want.”

“What happened to _self-disclosure_?” Eliot asks.

“Oh, I mean...fuck that, I guess,” Quentin says, oddly off-handed. “I mean, it's not that I wouldn't prefer that, but. I guess what really matters to me is that. That I'm not something you have to buy with silence. So just. Whatever you feel like saying. That's what you should say.”

Eliot breathes. He wonders what _before dawn_ means. He wonders how much time he has before the rain, or what time it is now, or what _time even is_ now that it's nothing Eliot ever believed. “All right,” Eliot finally says. “Thank you for clarifying the rules. You can ask me again now.”

“How are you, Eliot?” Quentin asks, warm and amused like they're playing a game. Deadly earnest and sincere like they're building a life.

“I'm really – trying. So hard,” Eliot says.

“I know,” Quentin says. “And I love you for it.”

Those are the rules in Quentin's world, Eliot supposes, where effort is always noted and sometimes even rewarded. It feels – nice.

Eliot falls asleep and wakes up shoved against the trundle drawer below Quentin's bed. Quentin has made himself a space on the floor by brute force. His face is pressed to Eliot's chest, and when Eliot touches his back and the back of his head, Quentin's shirt and hair are baked to the temperature of the stone hearth surrounding the fire.

The rain falls steadily on their sad but sturdy little thatched roof. Eliot can't make himself peel his hand away from where it cradles Quentin's warm hair. Quentin must feel the touch in his sleep – or maybe he's awake. Either way, Eliot can feel the way Quentin stirs against him, nuzzling into Eliot's shoulder, the way his mouth curves into a smile.

It's Quentin's first today.


	3. One Year

Quentin wakes up late, because Eliot's not there to wake him. There's no tea because the fire's gone cool, but there's a slightly warm hand-pie resting on a dishtowel on top of the fireplace, and a little sprig of wildflowers along with it – just the kind that grow weedily all over the hilltop and Eliot dries in bundles hanging over the stove because they smell nice mixed in with the straw on the floors, but still, you know? Eliot left him breakfast and flowers, and that's--

That's got to be a good sign?

And Quentin's been waiting for a while now. For a sign.

The pie is the rich kind, with beef and raisins and cloves, the kind Eliot made all winter long, but seemed to take off the menu over the summer. Quentin's surprised to see it return, with the weather still so warm, and the turn into chilly autumn evenings at least two months away. Of course, it's also Quentin's favorite.

Good sign? Or is he just seeing what he wants to see now? He doesn't even know for sure that Eliot realizes what today is. They don't really keep track of day-days, other than the count at the top corner of their Mosaic records. They don't pay attention to weekdays and weekends, or to birthdays, or to any holidays except for the wine-pressing festival that Eliot dragged him to last fall. There's no real reason to think that Eliot – cares about dates and days and – milestones and things like that, and there's no reason now that Quentin thinks about it to assume that Eliot would be happy about it if he did notice.

One year. It's not exactly something to celebrate, is it? Bittersweet at best.

Maybe the whole concept is kind of bullshit – waiting for signs. Quentin nibbles on his breakfast and twists the tough, woody stem of the flowers back and forth between his fingers, the delicate white bells already drooping. His favorite pie and a half-wilted weed. It's not exactly the skies parting and a choir of angels descending to sing in sixteen-part harmony, _Quentin, you ass, just kiss him already._

He's been waiting for a sign for months, but aren't there signs every day? A little thing that Eliot remembers. The way he lets his real laugh slip out now and then, the inelegant, braying one. An arm over Quentin's shoulder by the fire. A squash blossom plucked out of the garden and tucked behind Quentin's ear.

A sign of _what_ , what does Quentin even need a sign for? To tell him that Eliot cares? Eliot can't take a five-minute break from caring, Eliot is _made_ of care. A sign that it's – that it's safe to be honest with Eliot about all the things Quentin is sure of and all the things he's not? Quentin doesn't need that. Eliot already makes himself safe, gentle and sturdy and dependable and forgiving no matter how Quentin's acting out.

Worst-case scenario, if Quentin – acts out in a whole new way, Eliot will just pet his hair and say _Oh, Q_ in the saddest, kindest tone, and Quentin will know. It'll be embarrassing and awkward and – disappointing, but then at least he'll _know_ , and he can start getting over-- Moving past it.

He's been moving into it for a year now (a year or maybe more), starting out at _it's so weird how I can't shake this confusing and guilt-inducing attraction to my best friend_ and getting pulled further and further downriver, caught in the current of _am I gazing into his eyes, is that weird?_ and _I like napping outside on the daybed but not because the pillow smells like him_ and _oh, that was an unexpectedly intense dream_ , pulled relentlessly into _do I have a crush on Eliot?_ and eventually all the way off the edge of _what even are feelings?_ and into _fuck it, everything is a mess but I would do anything to be naked with him and also I love him question mark?_ But mostly the naked part, that's an exclamation point.

If it's not an option for them, then Quentin needs to put a stop to all of this  _yesterday_ . If it is an option....

Well, there's only one way to know for sure. Quentin's just been. Waiting for the right moment to bring it up. Not  _waiting for a sign_ in, like, a destiny way, just. Trying to read the room.

Today is Eliot's fortnightly (or biweekly, but  _fortnightly_ just sounds more Fillorian) trip down to the village, and he made Quentin's favorite food last night so Quentin wouldn't wake up hungry and picked him a flower to put him in a good mood, and that seems – good, right? A good room.

Eliot's always so sweet to him. If the answer is  _Oh, Q_ then at least he knows Eliot will go out of his way to smooth things over, to get them both back to normal. Eliot's not the kind of person who would let – something like this turn into a weird, haunted cold spot in the middle of their relationship that they both have to avoid for the rest of their lives.

So Quentin has...nothing to lose, really, and everything to gain.

Of course, that's exactly where things have stood for at least two or three months, and here they still are. The proverbial square one. The Mosaic is coming along faster than the resolution to whatever-this-is, because at least Quentin's actually  _doing_ something about that.

Speaking of which. Quentin has work to do today.

It's a productive day – well, it's the same level of not-productive that every day is, in that he finishes three patterns and nothing magical happens. But three's a pretty good number; Quentin can get two done on most days, but that's with Eliot around to distract him.

On his own, Quentin guesses he'd go fifty percent faster.

That's such a stupid thought that it almost makes him laugh. On his own, he'd have been hanging from the rafters last October.

He takes a lunch break even though he's not that hungry, mostly because if Eliot were here, he'd insist. It's strange, eating alone; he feels like he's stealing Eliot's food. The jerky and yogurt (it's not really yogurt, Quentin thinks it's more like a cross between buttermilk and kefir? But he really likes whatever it is) come from the village, but what Quentin spreads over the jerky slices is a bean mash that's Eliot's latest unsuccessful but still edible attempt to replicate hummus with Fillorian spices. He eats outside while he takes notes on the second pattern, on a page with a careful 365 written in the top corner, and the in the heat of the afternoon he goes down to the ford for a bath so he won't be  _quite_ as sweaty and gross as usual. Why does he sweat so much more than Eliot does? Ugh, because  _Eliot_ , he guesses.

Eliot is so, so, so out of Quentin's league in any universe where they aren't trapped together three miles from the next-nearest human being. Of course, that's this universe, so.

Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. Positive thinking. Right.

Usually when Quentin goes down to the ford, it's his opportunity for, um, Special Alone Time, but this time he's – not sure if that's – should he? Maybe it's good to, you know, take the edge off, maybe it would make him less jittery. That sounds logical, but it just feels off, somehow. His heart's not in the idea, his own hand tolerable in the way that it's always tolerable, but – depressing, when it's so uppermost in his mind what he really wants.

There's nothing wrong with Quentin's hand, except that it's not Eliot's hand. And there are about forty thousand things Quentin doesn't know – about who he is, about what he wants, about what all of this means – but he knows that just watching Eliot's hands glide through a tut or knead dough, watching the way his forearm flexes when he grips the water pump, the way he sharpens a knife or shakes his hand out before reaching for a different piece of chalk when he's working on a pattern--

What was Quentin thinking a second ago? Right. That the mere fact of Eliot's hands makes it really hard to focus on anything else sometimes. Usually the fact of Eliot's hands doesn't interfere with Quentin's masturbation habits – literally the opposite of that, it's been extremely helpful at times – but today is. Things are different today. Or Quentin hopes they are, at least. If he doesn't lose his nerve.

He can hear Eliot coming before Quentin sees him, and he knows that's deliberate – Eliot sings to himself all the time, but there's a certain way that he – pitches it differently, or projects more or something, when he wants Quentin's attention. And of course, Eliot likes to make an entrance.

“ _And I never was smart with love_ ,” he's singing as he crests the hill, hefting two leather bags full of the usual staples plus whatever weirdness he's discovered this time. “ _I let the bad ones in and the good ones go, but I'm gonna love you like I've never been hurt before, I'm gonna love you like I'm indestructible...._ ”

It's stupid, but Quentin can't help putting his arm up and waving, like maybe Eliot won't see him otherwise, sitting in the middle of the Mosaic in broad daylight? Whatever, he just – can't they both want attention? Quentin  _doesn't_ , usually, from most people, but. It's Eliot, and he's home.

“Do you know what today is?” Eliot asks him, holding his hand down to Quentin when he's close enough. Quentin wraps a hand around his forearm and gets to his feet; his heart is pounding, because Eliot looks radiant, strong and happy and – in terms of reading the room, Quentin couldn't have hoped for better. Without waiting for Quentin to answer, Eliot says, “It's our anniversary.”

“Oh, yeah?” Quentin says faintly, making himself let go of Eliot's arm.

“That's right. For one full year now, you and I have been getting boned together by this fucking Mosaic.”

Quentin can't help laughing. He feels almost hysterical with – Eliot's high spirits catching him on the updraft – on  _hope_ . “Wow,” he says. “Our second-worst threesome ever. Congratulations, I guess?”

“Wait til you see what I brought you,” Eliot says, slinging the bags onto the table.

Quentin sits down for the live-action unboxing video; Eliot makes all the shopping trips not just because he doesn't hate interacting with strangers as much as Quentin does, but also because he derives some kind of primal delight from this ritual, hunting and gathering and displaying his catch. Some of it is the usual, of course – yeast and salt and more non-yogurt and more wine – but there's always something new. This time there's clotted cream and jam, and a small sack full of sticky hard candy, and a pack of neck bones for broth, and a jar of honey, and a tiny tin of something that turns out to be eyeliner, with a tiny brush. That's the part Eliot is most excited about.

Quentin could really kiss him right now, but. Maybe dinner first? He's not losing his nerve, he just-- Dinner first is a good idea, actually.

Eliot's had a potato chowder going over the stove for a couple of days, and it's just the right level of mushy and steeped in peppery goodness by now, so they have that for dinner. Eliot puts on his new eyeliner, and Quentin doesn't know if it's that in and of itself or just the aura of preening satisfaction coming off of Eliot, but it does make him look just – god, so. God,  _look_ at him – and all Quentin's done today is take a bath and brush his hair. It doesn't feel like enough. He doesn't know what else he should've done, but he doesn't want to just – roll up in the same t-shirt he's been wearing for a year (thank god for Marillon's Magic Laundromat) and act like Eliot should – settle for what he can get, you know?

Eliot deserves – well, what doesn't Eliot deserve? Champagne and – and world travel, and haute couture and a dozen beautiful men falling all over each other to compete for his attention, and instead he has – this. Quentin. And instead of being bitter about it, with  _every right_ to be bitter about it, Eliot is trying to make this grim anniversary into something celebratory, something worth putting on makeup for. It breaks Quentin's heart, and it feels....

He doesn't know, it just, it makes him  _feel_ , and he can't name it, can't make sense out of it, he's so stupid when it comes to this stuff, he just  _feels_ , and it's intense and chaotic and confusing, and he wants Eliot's arms around him to ground him into his body, to keep his head from flying apart and his heart from pounding out of his chest.

Is this what love feels like? It's not like – any of the other times.

“Hey,” Eliot says gently, and Quentin looks up blinking from where he's been just holding onto his crumpet and clotted cream and jam. Twilight is creeping up on them, and this is normally when they'd relocate to the firepit, but they've been lingering on the blanket over their dinner. Maybe because it's a special occasion. Maybe because Quentin is scared to be finished with dinner and – move on. Move forward.

Nothing to lose, right? But if that's true, why is he so terrified?

“I hope you didn't have a hard day,” Eliot says. “I know it's.... Well, it's a year that we didn't plan for. But we did it, you know? I think it's – I think we deserve to be happy about it.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, suddenly realizing why Eliot thinks--  _Oh._ “No – no, Eliot, I'm not – it's okay, I'm not, um, upset or – sad or whatever. I mean, I think it is – something we should be proud of. Especially you, you've – done so much, this past year.”

Eliot smiles at him, and Quentin's heart practically  _riots_ . If this is love, how do people do it over and over and not just  _stroke out_ ? “I found something else in town,” Eliot says. “A little present for you.”

Quentin shakes his head automatically –  _no, it's too much_ –  _no, I don't need presents, I need to kiss you, I need you to kiss me_ – but of course Eliot isn't paying attention to that, and he puts a palm-sized square in Quentin's hand, wrapped in cheesecloth and ribbon. It's too much. Quentin's fingers fumble with the ribbon, but he eventually manages it, and it's – a small deck of cards printed in muted colors. Quentin thumbs through it, sorting its structure out in his head – suits and numbers, but the suits are flowers and strawberries and wine bottles, twelve cards of each, and a second set of court cards that seem unrelated to the suits but depict three rival kingdoms of mice and owls and humans. Quentin has no idea what games are played with a deck like this, which is faintly embarrassing for him; why didn't he learn this when he lived in Fillory the first time? “Eliot,” he says. “I. You didn't have to.”

“Of course I did,” he says. “The little mouse king reminded me of you.”

“Um, thanks,” Quentin laughs, and then, more seriously, “Thank you.”

Eliot lowers his eyes to the blanket when he smiles in response, and that's – unusual. Quentin wonders if it – means anything?

Like a good sign or something?

The first time that Quentin thought seriously that there were upsides as well as downsides to being non-platonic friends with Eliot was early in the winter, during the year's first snowfall. Eliot was pacing the house like a bored jaguar, and if it didn't seem like a waste of meat, Quentin would have stuffed a gourd full of stew beef and rolled it around the floor for enrichment like those zoo videos. The thought crossed his mind almost idly –  _if we were together, we coud just spend the whole winter in bed, that's probably how real Fillorians survive the cabin fever_ .

But then it didn't go away, no matter what Quentin tried to distract himself with, or how sternly he deployed his entire, extensive arsenal of catastrophizing and negativity bias to bring himself back down to the ground. Or at least, it never went away permanently, even though Quentin could hold it at bay sometimes with a combination of distraction, negativity bias, and low self-esteem, but it would always come back. That thought.  _If we were...._

They're not. But  _if they were_ .

Ironically, it was easiest to ignore during the long winter nights, when Quentin managed to harry and cajole Eliot into bed with him. Somehow the sheer familiarity of it cancelled out the air of the forbidden, and it was easy to think of Eliot as – furniture-like, a nice-smelling heat source like the wrapped hot bricks they kept at the foot of the bed, firmer than a pillow under Quentin's cheek. Yeah, sometimes there was – a small zing, when their thighs rubbed together as they shifted around, or when Eliot sucked in a breath of air in his sleep in a suggestive sort of way. But mostly it just felt practical and predictable and – necessary.

Getting used to sleeping alone again in the spring changed things. That's when the absence of Eliot started to feel like a mistake of some kind. Impractical at best. Depressing at worst.

Some nights when Quentin couldn't sleep, he'd get up and pad on bare feet over to the window, pull the curtain aside and squint out into the darkness, searching for the shape of the daybed and the pile of pillows and blankets and Eliot on top of it. He'd rest his forehead against the thick glass and his hand over his chest, feeling his erratic heartbeat, wondering what he put at risk, if he risked this.

Quentin's not fantastic with risk. But he can be brave when it matters.

It took him all spring to admit to himself that this mattered, and most of the summer to feel that the time was right. That he'd be stupid to put this off until he had all the answers, because maybe the answers to this didn't exist locked up inside Quentin's skull. Maybe they existed in the places where Quentin and Eliot met, the gaps and the contact, the fear and the friendship.

Maybe if Quentin wants answers, that's where he needs to put himself.

Quentin does the dishes, and when he comes back it's getting pretty close to full dark, and Eliot is lounging on the blanket with the torches lit around the Mosaic. It's not their typical routine, but Quentin doesn't mind.

It's not a typical night. Quentin doesn't  _want_ it to be, and it seems like – on one level or another, neither does Eliot. Good sign.

They open the new wine, which even Quentin, who's hopeless with this kind of thing, can tell is better quality than their usual stuff, and Eliot hand-feeds him a couple of lemony hard candies with fingers that still taste residually of jam, and it's – god, it's  _practically_ the angels in sixteen-part harmony, that's how perfect it is, the stars and the wine and Eliot's hands and Eliot's smile.

Over the two hundred or so days since he first started thinking about a night like this, Quentin's thought of a million ways to broach this subject, debated himself endlessly about whether he should be – romantic, or make a rational argument for the advantages, or ask a bunch of questions about Eliot's feelings, or pretend that he's being fun and spontaneous. He's devised and rejected so many approaches that he's made himself kind of sick of the whole thing, honestly, and so after one half-hearted attempt at an  _Eliot, I..._ he just. He just kind of goes, fuck it. Saying things implies he knows things. He just – kisses Eliot, which hopefully only implies he wants desperately to be kissed, which is one of the few facts about himself that Quentin is currently willing to stand behind.

When he pulls back, Eliot's eyes are still closed, and that comes as a little bit of a surprise. He doesn't know why he imagined that Eliot would kiss with his eyes open, except that Eliot – always sees so much.

Now is another moment when Quentin could – say something romantic or funny or honest or reassuring, or literally anything at all, but he just kind of – can't. He doesn't know. He just knows that he's done this thing, and he doesn't know what it is, but it feels huge.

Eliot's eyes flutter open, and he takes Quentin in, and Quentin almost can't breathe, because Eliot is smiling, and everything is starlight and heat and the taste of candy. Eliot moves his hand on top of Quentin's, and when he leans in to take another kiss, he slips his other hand against Quentin's neck, holding him steady.

It's done. It's done, Quentin has done this, taken the risk, seized the day. Even if they stop right now, something has  _happened_ and things have changed. Quentin leans eagerly into Eliot's kiss, because he's fucking  _terrified_ , but the only cure for that he knows is Eliot.

They kiss for what must be hours – Quentin is too addled to work it out in his head, but one nice thing about lying on his back is that he's able to glimpse the stars as they rise higher in the sky.

Everything else nice about lying on his back is Eliot lying above him. His shirt is half-unbuttoned, drooping off one shoulder with his sharp collarbones exposed, and Quentin would've kept working on the buttons, but he got distracted by – everything – and gave up, lacing his fingers together behind Eliot's long neck and hanging on while Eliot's mouth explores Quentin's jawline and the underside of his chin and his lips. Eliot has murmured his name at least five times –  _Quentin_ and  _Quentin_ ,  _Q_ and  _Q_ and  _Q_ . Every time it vibrates against Quentin's skin he melts a little more, because it's  _Eliot, Eliot, El_ inside his head all the time, and he wants this to be – mutual, he wants Eliot to feel the things – to feel at least some of what Quentin does.

That's a lot to ask. But it's a big day. If Quentin can't ask for big things now, when can he?

When Eliot's long fingers pluck the band out of Quentin's hair, Quentin stops groping Eliot's ass and makes a grab for it, because he keeps track of that thing like a dragon, it's going to  _kill_ him when it finally breaks. Eliot, who knows this very well, like he knows so much about Quentin, laughs softly against Quentin's mouth while Quentin sticks it in his pocket. “You're laughing at me,” Quentin says, stupid and happy.

“No, no,” Eliot lies quickly. He runs his fingers through Quentin's loose hair and sighs warmly against the corner of Quentin's lips. “Never, you're perfect.”

Well,  _that's_ a new one. “You know I'm already going to sleep with you, right?” Quentin says.

“No,” Eliot says, surprisingly sober and earnest. “I – wasn't assuming that.”

“Oh,” Quentin says. “Well, I. Hope so, anyway.”

Eliot smiles and kisses him again lightly, deft fingers pushing Quentin's hair away from his forehead. “You hope? What do you hope?”

Quentin doesn't have an immediate answer for that. He's – not great with hope. He was so focused on  _whether_ that he hasn't really spent any time wondering  _how_ , wondering what it would be like, what he – what he's ready for, what he  _wants_ . Just – Eliot. “I just want to be with you,” he blurts out like an idiot, like a middle-schooler who wants Eliot to go steady.

But Eliot nods like he's making sense. Eliot shifts to the side a little, bracing on his forearm with one leg thrown over Quentin's legs, and Quentin cups his hand over Eliot's knee and slides it carefully up the outside of his thigh. He's only touching the fabric of Eliot's pants, but he can feel the warmth and solidity of the body underneath, and he  _wants_ and he  _wants_ but he doesn't  _know_ \-- “We're not going to do anything you're not sure about,” Eliot says, which kind of rules out  _literally everything_ , so that's not Quentin's favorite plan. “This is all up to you, okay?”

“Oh, good,” Quentin says. “Because an infinite range of choices is really the kind of situation where I shine.”

“Okay, I'm sensing sarcasm,” Eliot says. He gazes thoughtfully at Quentin in the torchlight, his fingers still playing with Quentin's hair in a very distracting way. “Let's try an experiment, shall we?”

“Why not,” Quentin says.

“I love a spirit of adventure,” Eliot says. “Okay, I'm going to – take three turns. And every turn, I'll name a part of my body, and then you touch it. If you want to touch it. Or else you don't. Either way, we'll learn something interesting.”

“When you say touch...” Quentin prompts.

Eliot shrugs a little with the shoulder that isn't bearing his weight. “Any way you want. And then when my turns are over, you can take three turns, and everything you name, I'll kiss. So if you've decided you're – kind of done trying things for now, you can just pick your mouth, and I'll kiss you goodnight.”

In spite of the warm evening, Quentin shivers a little. There's an ache associated with the very idea of  _goodnight_ at this point, of going back to square one. But still, he understands why Eliot wants to make sure Quentin has an exit strategy. It's sweet of him; who knew that Eliot Waugh, connoisseur of party drugs and fivesomes and magic-assisted decadence, would be so good at – this? At making allowances for a hopelessly out-of-his-depth partner? Quentin fully intends to see this through to the end, whatever the end is, but he appreciates the spirit of the offer. “Sure,” he says. “Yeah, let's – let's try it.”

They readjust positions, Eliot finishing the job of removing his shirt and laying himself out on his back for Quentin to – do whatever he's about to do to Eliot's frankly ridiculous slim, graceful body. Quentin figures that makes it okay to go ahead and take his own shirt off, even though he's – well, him. Quentin's never had a ton of body-shame; he thinks he's, you know, probably fine in that department, but then, none of his previous partners have had a lot more sexual history than Quentin has, and intellectually Quentin knows that Eliot's probably not comparing him to – whoever, but Quentin still feels like – he probably doesn't compare. To whoever. Quentin hasn't really met a lot of Eliot's ex-lovers, but he knows that Eliot doesn't typically choose them because they're good at card tricks and calculus.

Anyway, whatever, Eliot's seen him naked more than once; he knows what he's getting into. Quentin breaks through the loop of his own anxious thoughts by reaching for Eliot's hand, pressing their palms together and curling his fingers so they're just slightly overlapping with Eliot's. It feels good; it feels sexy, hovering on the edge like that, resisting his physical urge to push through and grip and hang on.

Eliot gives him a little smile and says, “Ear.” Quentin blinks, and then he frowns. “You think I'm going easy on you, don't you?” Eliot says. He's right. “No, I really like it, that's a spot for me. Try it, you'll see.”

Quentin takes his hand back and reaches for Eliot's ear. He starts the tips of two fingers at the top of the shell of Eliot's ear and traces his way slowly down toward the lobe, and the effect is noticeable in the way Eliot's pupils dilate, the way his lips part slowly, almost in time with the speed of Quentin's fingers. Quentin waits to see if he'll ask for more, before he remembers that choosing what kind of touch is Quentin's role here. He tries bringing his thumb up to the other side of Eliot's earlobe and tugging very gently, rubbing it between his fingers, and one of Eliot's legs twitches slightly.

It sends the weirdest thrill of power through Quentin. This is Eliot, and Quentin is making him feel.... Quentin leans down and flicks Eliot's earlobe with his tongue, then closes his teeth carefully around it and flicks again, and Eliot's hand grips the small of Quentin's back and he groans, “Quentin,  _fuck_ . God, if you're good in bed, I swear there's no justice in the world.”

“Hey,” Quentin protests. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Eliot says. “It's fine, you can be good in bed, I don't mind.”

“Okay, well, thanks,” Quentin laughs, and then he licks and sucks on Eliot's ear some more, and he's not sure that this experiment is a game, exactly, but he feels like he's got a real chance to win it anyway.

Of course, there are no losers in this scenario.

“Okay,” Eliot says breathlessly after a minute. “Ah – collar- collarbone.”

Quentin hums affirmatively and squirms down a little, ducking his head to kiss one sharp point of Eliot's collarbone, because something interesting that Quentin is learning about himself is that when given the option to touch Eliot, he seems to instinctively do that with his mouth. His fingers scrape down the middle of Eliot's chest, testing out the unfamiliar texture of Eliot's chest hair, as he works outward along the bones, suckling just enough to draw blood and heat to the surface, hopefully not hard enough to leave a mark. Not that there's anyone else to notice or care, but it seems tacky.

When he's got Eliot's chest expanding and falling dramatically under his hand, panting for oxygen and control, Quentin lifts his head and gazes down into Eliot's eyes. As innocently as he can, he says, “Third turn?”

“Fuck,” Eliot says, almost reverently.

“Good enthusiasm,” Quentin says. “Not a body part, though.”

“Oh, so you're a brat, are you?” Eliot says, and Quentin guesses they're teasing each other like they so often do, but Eliot puts some kind of dark spin on the words from low in his throat that makes this – new and raw and deeply sexual. It gives Quentin the vague sense that if he agrees, something very nice will happen to him next, and he's tempted, but also a little – intimidated. It rushes back in on him all at once, how much Eliot knows, how much he's done. How not prepared for this thing he's kickstarted Quentin probably is. It must show in his eyes, because Eliot relaxes, uncoiling some of the tension he was holding in his body, and he reaches up and cups Quentin's neck in his hand with a sweet little smile. It's not insincere, Quentin doesn't think, but it's also very visibly a performance; he's signalling his harmlessness, acting out the control he's placing in Quentin's hands. “Thigh,” he says.

Quentin's eyes flick downward. Eliot does not have the kind of dick that's built to be tucked discreetly away, and right now it's really ruining the line of his pants, the pants that – Quentin knows he has to remove now, if only for his own sense of honor. Eliot would let him get away with a little clothed groping, of course, but that's – not what Quentin wants, and he'll be really hard on himself, he knows, if he comes this far and then decides not to get what he wants.

They don't have to do every single thing tonight, not by any means, but they're nowhere near done yet. Quentin knows that, and he's not going to pretend otherwise just because he's kind of freaking out at the prospect of being, as it were, eye-to-eye with Eliot's cock for the first time stone-cold sober.

If Quentin has some kind of – gay panic experience right now, he'll never forgive himself.  _Eliot_ will forgive him in a heartbeat, hug him and pet his hair and tell him he doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to do, blah blah blah, but Quentin won't take it nearly so well. He can't be that person, he just – can't. It's not fair to either of them, when both of them want so much more.

Quentin's memories of – the first time, the other time – are a disjointed mess, and even some of the things that feel like memories, he can't be sure aren't just his brain filling in fantasies for the missing pieces. He remembers kissing Eliot while straddling his lap. He remembers laughing drunkenly with Margo about Eliot's scratchy stubble. He remembers Eliot's big hands sliding from Quentin's hips around to the backs of his legs and squeezing, and Eliot's giddy drunken giggle, and Eliot's thighs on either side of him, pinning him into place while he had his face buried between Margo's breasts. He remembers how Eliot's dick stretched his mouth and made his jaw ache with effort, and how Quentin's own dick leaked and quivered as he felt himself go woozy, spread-open and helpless,  _taken_ and claimed and possessed in ways that didn't resemble anything Quentin had ever felt before, in bed or out.

He's pretty sure he wouldn't have made that up. He's pretty sure he's not that creative.

But okay, now he's just – borrowing trouble, he's jumping several steps ahead of himself, and the whole point of this was not to do that. It's just – one thing at a time, and right now that thing isn't cocksucking, it's literally just taking Eliot's pants off and touching his leg, which if Quentin can't do that, then he should chalk this whole thing up as a failure right now.

But he can. Of course he can. He unbuttons and unzips Eliot's pants and works them down Eliot's narrow hips, and down and down and down his stupidly endless legs. He puts his hand above Eliot's knee and pushes it up, moving against the grain of the hair, and Eliot murmurs his pleasure. Eliot's cock is very much present for all of this, pushing up above the band of his underwear to rest against his stomach, but looking at it doesn't make Quentin feel woozy or overwhelmed or anything like that, it's just – nice. It's handsome, is that a weird thing to say? Quentin just thinks that if they had NSFW spreads in, like, GQ or Esquire or whatever, Eliot would have the right kind of cock for that; it looks not just physically substantial, but  _successful_ , like it would coordinate perfectly with Rolexes and Hugo Boss suits and whatever else they sell to the aspirational-manhood crowd, Quentin never paid that much attention. 

It feels like the most obvious thing in the world, a natural progression. Quentin grips Eliot's thigh warmly, kneading a little into the muscle, and Eliot sighs and stretches, letting his knees drift apart a bit, so Quentin gives him a squeeze and then moves back on his knees (he's going to have bruises from doing this on the tiles, they both are, and he could not give less of a damn) so he can kiss up the inside of Eliot's leg, seeking out the blood-hot thrum of the pulse in his femoral artery. Then Quentin is so close to Eliot's underwear that he can't see any reason not to put his mouth on it, sucking kisses close to the base of his dick. “Oh, my god,” Eliot says, and he sounds drugged and distant, lost in a dream. “Oh, my god,  _Q_ .”

His hips are twitching, rocking from side to side while his thighs flex on either side of Quentin's shoulders, and Quentin knows Eliot's struggling not to grab his head and thrust up against his mouth for more heat, more contact. Quentin is torn; he appreciates the effort, and Eliot's not technically wrong that anything more intense might kind of freak Quentin out, but also it's such a  _high_ , having this kind of power over Eliot. Forcing him to fight himself for control, when Eliot's normally so damn good at control.

Quentin hooks his fingers in the waistband of Eliot's underwear and tugs down, and Eliot swears loud enough to, Quentin swears, rattle the tiles. It only makes Quentin more confident, and he licks roughly over bare skin, and he finds that sucking kisses against it is no more difficult than sucking Eliot's tongue into his mouth – all just different forms of flesh and pleasure and intimacy, of  _life_ , of the beauty of life.

It feels good. It feels right, and when Quentin circles the tip with his tongue and Eliot comes abruptly, hot and slick and bitter in and around Quentin's mouth, that feels right, too. Quentin wasn't totally sure, before, what he wanted, and he's still not  _totally_ sure, but he's sure he wants this. He wants to make Eliot let go, and he wants to be the name Eliot calls out helplessly when he does.

Quentin sits up and reaches for the cup of wine that's in arm's reach, he's not sure which of theirs it was. Before he can get hold of it, though, Eliot grabs his arm and pulls it back, pulls Quentin down over him with a mumbly, “Don't you dare,” and lifts his head up to catch Quentin in a messy, wide-open kiss, lapping at Quentin's lips, sucking them clean. Quentin shudders and sighs, eyes shut, world spinning, flushed and hard and floating on a high that he hasn't experienced since the day Dean Fogg shouted at him and he made a deck of cards dance in the air.

“Fuck,” Eliot whispers hoarsely, the tip of his tongue flicking delicately below Quentin's lip. “You.... Fuck.”

Without opening his eyes, Quentin smiles. “My turn?”

“Yeah,  _fuck_ , name it,” Eliot groans. “Anything you want.”

“Put your hand on me,” says Quentin, who has completely forgotten the rules of the experiment and doesn't even care. “I look at your hands  _all the time_ , I want, I want you to jerk me off, I think about it all the time, El, please.”

“Yeah, shh, shh,” Eliot soothes, combing his fingers through Quentin's hair and cradling his skull for security while he rolls them both over. “It's all right.”

“I want....” Quentin begins, and he doesn't know how to finish.

Eliot works Quentin's pants down to his thighs efficiently and one-handed, the other hand still stroking at the crown of Quentin's head. “I know,” he says, and Quentin's willing to believe that Eliot has all the answers that Quentin doesn't. That seems perfectly natural, actually. “I know, darling. It's all right.”

And then Eliot's hand,  _Eliot's hand_ , and the only thing Quentin wishes he could change is he wishes he could see, but all he can see is Eliot's beautiful eyes, shadowed and rimmed, deep and searching, fixed on Quentin's face like nothing else has ever mattered to him. Quentin can't breathe, everything is trapped in his chest, and he wants and he wants and he's never known anyone like Eliot and his life doesn't make sense, it makes  _no sense_ that he  _lives in Fillory_ and gets to have sex with this brilliant, glamorous literal King who should never have known Quentin existed, let alone looked at him like they were practically in love. He can feel the ache of it all battering against his ribs, the too-much of it, how he doesn't know who he is or how he got here or what it all means, how sometimes he can't believe he's even alive, thirteen years after the first time he swallowed a bottle of Advil and thought it would be the end of him.

But he's here, and he feels joyful and humble and broken and safe, and he wants and he wants and he wants  _Eliot_ , and he breathes Eliot's name over and over as he comes, until Eliot kisses him quiet at last, every bit of him finally, finally floating and quiet and present in one place at one time. Sure, it's not quite  _his_ place and  _his_ time, but Quentin will take it.

He's been out of place his whole life, but at least now he's not alone.

When he needs to breathe, Eliot tilts his head, pressing his forehead against Quentin's, and they both take slow, shuddering breaths in time together, longer and softer and more even, breath by breath. It's Eliot, of course, who's able to speak first, and he strokes Quentin's cheek with his thumb and says, “God, I want a fucking cigarette.”

Quentin closes his eyes and laughs and laughs, because he wants that, too. He wants, and he's lived in a place where he didn't have it in him to  _want_ for years and years on end in the past, and he's so grateful that part of his life is over, and he's so sure that Eliot has saved him from it.

They're kind of a mess in the morning, stiff and sticky and just generally very unregal. They give each other shy, sparkling smiles, saying very little except  _can you believe?_ with their eyes, and they wash up and eat breakfast and it's normal but it's not. It's their life, but it's irretrievably different.

And then instead of anything useful, they sit on the blanket in companionable silence until deep into midmorning, watching wildflower seeds drift through the air and butterflies move from blossom to blossom in Eliot's squash patch.

“Let's save our overthinking for the Mosaic,” Eliot says, and Quentin doesn't know to what degree that's a promise he's capable of keeping, but he nods anyway.

That night they do it all again, but on the daybed this time, which is a good decision.

The less Quentin thinks, the better his decisions seem to be. So that's something interesting he's learning.


	4. Two Years

The old chicken coop has, through a combination of Eliot's innate telekinetic prowess (useful) and Lunk's sweaty, shirtless manual labor (visually appealing), been transformed into a very exciting new experiment in brewing plum wine, which Eliot intends to perfect and then sell at a much higher profit than Quentin's idea for the restored outbuilding, which was rabbit hutch.

“Sure,” Quentin grumbled after Eliot showed him the actual math he'd used to actually calculate the overhead for this venture, like a very serious and responsible person who _didn't_ get a C-minus in Microeconomics his freshman year of college or rule over a nation with no non-beetle-related sources of revenue. “Assuming you don't drink the stock.”

“That's extremely hurtful,” Eliot said, only half seriously. It wasn't _extremely_ hurtful. “I've put in a line item for on-premises consumption, see?”

“I like the rabbits,” Quentin said earnestly, looking up from Eliot's paperwork and cheating outrageously by looking – the way Quentin looks. “They're a self-renewing resource, and they're...soft.”

“Oh, _I'll_ drink all the product, but _you_ won't name the cash crop, and get _attached_ , and cry when I skin them. A likely story.” And Eliot was entirely right, so Quentin just gave him a self-effacing little grin and surrendered the argument, and now they ferment plum wine in the old coop.

It's still a work in progress, but Quentin has been kind enough not to remark on how they'd have sold three generations of rabbits this year if Eliot hadn't insisted on learning to make wine instead. It's an investment; the profit margin on rabbits will always be low and the competition high, but this could really turn into something, if Eliot can get it all just so.

He's always wanted to own a wine bar; he thought that was something he might do after graduation – handcrafted drinks and sundry potions, he knows it's a bit twee, but what's the point of being a Magician if you don't get to do something _fun_ for a living? Of course, that was all before the royalty thing was on the table, which in turn was before what Eliot did for a living was sweep floors and snare ducks and draw pictures of squares.

It's fine, Fillory is – really not so bad, after a certain period of adjustment. The weather is beautiful, and that's not just the opium talking. Magic exists. Eliot is, as far as Fillory seems to be aware, the inventor of pesto, what's not amusing about that? Arielle is teaching him to play a lute, which will probably come in handy when they go home – all the stableboys surely go weak in the knees for a lute-playing monarch, and Eliot enjoys being wanted even if that's as far as it goes.

Quests are inherently costly, but this one.... Well, Eliot has the coin to spare, at the moment, doesn't he?

He winces away from the metaphorical implications of _buying_ two years of peace and goddamn quiet, and that's to say nothing of buying companionship – oh, but why be coy? Of buying _Quentin_. Some metaphors just don't hold up under scrutiny, that's all.

 _We could be finished tomorrow_ , Eliot reminds himself as he washes his hands under the kitchen pump. Any given day could be their last, and that's – bittersweet. The very definition of bittersweet. Eliot rather likes the pathos of it; he feels like Eponine when he thinks ahead to the day they'll be done here – tomorrow, next month, another two years from now, whenever. The drama, the heartbreak, the showcase number, the heroic self-sacrifice.

Well, isn't he allowed to have a _little_ fun? Being a king is so _stressful_ , and everyone hates and resents him in his own timeline, other than his wife, who Eliot could really stand a touch more resentment from, honestly; it might spice things up a bit. A private, operatic tragedy, a memory of the doomed love-affair of Eliot's youth to nurture secretly in his bosom on the lonely nights – well. If you can't have happiness, desolate beauty is not a bad consolation prize.

And speaking of a beautiful tragedy, Eliot gives his gumbo a quick stir and checks the bread in the oven's proofing drawer, then heads through the cabin ( _someone_ won't let Eliot call it a hovel anymore) to check on Quentin.

A glance out the window shows that Quentin has taken a break from work, but not the kind of break that's actually useful or refreshing in any way. He's sitting on Eliot's daybed, knees pulled up and shoes tracking dirt on Eliot's coverlet. He's motionless, except for the tapping of his thumb back and forth against his fingertips, calculating something in his head.

Something with a string of zeroes behind it, probably. Eliot sighs and lets the curtain fall shut.

He resigned himself months ago to the fact that he's definitely his mother now, trying to solve every family problem by shoveling food down the nearest unresisting throat. It didn't work for the Waugh family and it doesn't work now, but it's still Eliot's first thought whenever Quentin looks unhappy. If Eliot had any subsequent thoughts he'd go with those instead, but nothing else ever seems to present itself, so. He cuts a wedge of shortbread that fills a whole bowl, then lays a slab of salt pork on top of it and drizzles on a crosshatch of strawberry syrup – that finishes up the last jar from spring, but the currants are still ripe so they haven't touched any of the jars of currant sauce in the pantry. In Eliot's personal opinion it's an extraordinarily disgusting thing to put in your mouth on purpose, but Quentin goes crazy for it, or for any combination of sweet and salt.

It won't really make Quentin happy, but that's not the point. The point is, he'll thank Eliot for bringing it to him, enabling Eliot to feel that he's done something valuable, and in a relationship built on limited options and shameless lies, that's about all a person can reasonably expect.

“Oh,” Quentin says when Eliot sets the bowl in his hands. “Thanks.”

“Mmm,” Eliot says. He climbs up behind Quentin on the bed, positioning himself so that Quentin is centered in between his legs. It's delicate choreography when Quentin is having a day like this; the worst thing you can do is ignore him, because he'll race his own brain to the bottom of the cliff if there's nothing in his way. The second-worst thing you can do, however, is to crowd him too closely, because that just urges him to clench up into a smaller and smaller space, closing around himself like a fist – sometimes until he's barely left himself room to breathe.

So there's an art to it. Eliot doesn't hug him or pull him close; he stays just far enough away that his chest brushes Quentin's back but isn't plastered to it, and he leaves his legs spread open widely enough that they barely make contact with Quentin's hips. But Quentin does like to be touched, in moderation, so Eliot settles his hands lightly on the outside of Quentin's folded knees and lets his palms mold gradually to their shape. He lets Quentin eat and breathe and tolerate him – lets Quentin acclimate.

Eliot finally feels the relief in Quentin's soft sigh, the surrender in the bow of his back, and Eliot knows he's been analyzed and judged more-than-tolerable. He leans closer, resting his head against Quentin's, and he strokes gentle circles over Quentin's knee. “How are the bubbles?” Quentin asks.

“Slowing. It'll be ready to siphon in – hm, three or four days?” Eliot thinks. It's all still trial and error, but he understands the basic mechanisms of the fermentation, and _three or four days_ sounds vague but not too vague. Eliot likes to think it sounds like the subtle attention to ever-shifting nuance of an experienced vintner rather than the educated guess of a dumbass. “Hey. Let me do the next pattern, okay? Give yourself the afternoon off.”

“To do what?” Quentin says.

“To do whatever. Go swimming? Take a nap? Just – something else.”

Quentin sighs and puts his mostly empty bowl to the side before leaning back against Eliot. Eliot covers the backs of Quentin's hands with his own and just keeps making sure his breathing is soft and slow and even. “Yeah,” Quentin finally says. “I guess I'm not good for much of anything like this.”

“You're just tired,” Eliot says, punctuating his lie with a kiss to the point of Quentin's jaw. “If you take a nap, the gumbo should be ready by the time you're up.”

“Please stop calling it gumbo,” Quentin says. Eliot can see him fighting a smile. “It's just fish chunks and frog legs.”

“It's a reinvention of the form. It's _adapted to our bioregion_.” Quentin laughs softly, and Eliot can't help pressing an advantage, kissing his cheek more firmly. “And you love it.”

“Okay, okay,” Quentin chuckles, squirming in Eliot's arms. “Sorry I inadvertently insulted your locavore, artisanal toe-of-frog stew. It is really good.”

He goes inside without offering Eliot a kiss in return, but that's all right. Eliot would rather see Quentin laugh, if it came to a choice.

The drawback to this plan is that now Eliot has to do the fucking Mosaic.

Eliot wouldn't entirely say that he hates this part of the quest – the _quest_ part of the quest, the _beauty of all life_ part of the quest. Sometimes he has an artistic urge, and he enjoys seeing the pattern that starts in his mind take shape before his eyes. Often in the late afternoon when Eliot's energy is at a low ebb, he lies on the daybed and lets Quentin narrate his thought processes while he works, and Eliot doesn't hate that part; whether he's in the mood to be helpful, or to tease Q to distraction, or just to laze around and breathe the heady Fillorian air, those afternoons are often the reward Eliot allows himself for a day's worth of real work.

Left to his own devices, however, just Eliot and fifteen stacks of tiles and an unsolvable riddle, the whole thing feels much, much less like a reward. It's tedious work, uncomfortably positioned, practically guaranteed to yield nothing, and it's – lonely. Eliot's never been especially fond of his own company; he manages an air of mystery that tends to work on other people (he honestly can't _believe_ how long it's continued to work on Quentin), but given even a few minutes of silence and solitude and a repetitive task he can't escape from, Eliot remembers how deadly boring he actually is once you get to know him, nothing but petty judgments and an infinite sea of self-pity.

He only gets through about half a pattern before he has to stop. He _has_ to, it's like being waterboarded – even knowing intellectually that this isn't going to kill him doesn't make it feel any less like he's _actively dying_.

His bread is probably done proofing by now. That seems like a good excuse to take a break. Eliot removes it from the warming drawer and transfers it to the oven, using magic to adjust the oven temperature, which is definitely cheating and he feels zero guilt about it; he'd use magic to hack the winemaking process, too, if he could figure out how.

The back door to the house is propped open with a rock to get a little air-flow inside. Eliot doesn't want to disturb whatever rest Quentin might be managing to get, but he can't contain his curiosity, either, so he sidles up to the doorway and peers through.

The fire's gone cold, so other than one slash of light falling through the open door, there's mostly darkness; Eliot has to step over the threshhold so his eyes can adjust before he can see anything at all. Quentin lies face-down on top of the bed with his shirt off, a completely reasonable accommodation to the close heat of the small space at the height of a summer afternoon, and yet there's nothing reasonable about the brute-force surge of emotion Eliot experiences, just standing here and watching him.

It's insane. It's insane that Quentin – _Quentin Coldwater_ , of all people – the things he _does_ to Eliot, without ever once having to try. The fate of magic in all worlds, and very specifically the entire existence of the one world that Eliot is tasked with overseeing, hangs over their heads at all times, and yet all Eliot wants in the world, any world, all the worlds, is just – to crawl up on that stupid, too-small bed and curl around Quentin, lay his cheek against the cool skin and gently defined muscle of Quentin's bare back.

 _Destiny is bullshit_ , Quentin assures him, but – how can that be right? Eliot never chose this, would never choose this. He wasn't interested in a _brother of the heart_ , and he absolutely would have politely and firmly declined any opportunity the universe presented him to become _half of one whole_. He never wanted his dilettante's taste for naive young men off-balance and overawed by the grandeur of Brakebills to metastasize into this – this obsession, this fixation on one person – _any_ one person, let alone a high-strung depressive who insists on _believing_ in Eliot, and thereby making it highly socially awkward for Eliot to just – fall apart and fail. Which he'd really like to do, some days. Most days.

It has to be destiny, right? Eliot never put himself in this situation _on purpose_. He hasn't even given his consent to falling in love, not that it matters, he's aware. But – he didn't. And he _doesn't_ consent, and he wants – okay, maybe not to stop loving Quentin, but can't he just – tap the brakes a bit? Can't he be _reasonable_ about it?

 _La douleur exquise_ is all well and good, and Eliot likes a beautiful tragedy probably a little more than is healthy, but god, sometimes it crosses the line. He was prepared to spend his life yearning for Quentin from afar, but _this is not afar_. It's really a special kind of misery, yearning for him from _right fucking here_.

Or maybe Eliot is just an arrogant, entitled prick. Maybe a normal person would shut up for ten seconds and be fucking grateful to have everything that Quentin gives him – his laughter and his sarcasm and his lust and his tenderness and his curiosity and his vulnerability and his loyalty, his _friendship_. What kind of a person spits all that out like it's somehow not good enough, like it's such a fucking burden to be handed almost everything Quentin has, everything Quentin is?

Should it really _have_ to matter at all? That Eliot wanted this from the moment he laid eyes on Quentin, and Quentin only – came around to wanting it when he was out of other options? If they ended up in more or less the same place, what's the difference, really?

It's only Eliot's pride that keeps him from being happy to have what he has. He could bear up under the pain of losing Quentin when they go home; he knows he could. He'd even find a certain amount of solace in seeing Quentin happy without him, because as a general rule Eliot is selfish and grasping and jealous, but Quentin is the exception to many a rule in Eliot's life. He would, he'd be happy to see Quentin happy; he's seen enough of Quentin sad to last him a lifetime already. It's the blow to his pride he can't tolerate. It's the fear that when the day comes, Eliot will – cry, or bargain, or beg, that he won't be able to stop himself, and god, how _sorry_ Quentin will be, how _sympathetic_. Just thinking about it makes the vilest sort of shame and self-loathing roil in Eliot's stomach.

Pride is a sin, of course. But Eliot's life has depended on it for so long, and somewhere along the line it became the one thing he doesn't think he can give up. Not for anything. Not even for Quentin. And so a certain amount of distance remains between them and has to remain between them. Certain things have to go unspoken, unconfessed. Certain intimacies have to be reserved, even as Eliot takes full advantage of all the intimacies they do share. It's delicate choreography; there's an art to it.

So Eliot starts another loaf of bread. It's soothing work, not less repetitive than the Mosaic, but at least at the end of it, you get bread.

He tries to be quiet as he moves between the pantry and the counter, but every little noise stands out in the afternoon quiet, and he's just pouring oil into the well of the dry ingredients to mix when he hears Quentin's feet shuffling through the straw as he approaches. Eliot glances over at Quentin as he hops up onto the counter next to Eliot, and he can't suppress a little smile at how sweet Quentin looks when he's blinking and rubbing his eyes sleepily. “Hand me the raisins,” Eliot says.

After glancing around, Quentin locates the jar and passes it over. “Are you making that same raisin bread as before?” Quentin asks. Eliot nods. “I liked that one.”

“Is that so? I had no idea,” Eliot says dryly. Quentin huffs a little laugh and bounces the side of his foot off Eliot's leg. “Feel better after a nap?” Eliot asks him.

“Actually, I really do,” Quentin says. “So that was a good idea, thanks.”

“You're welcome,” Eliot says.

To his surprise, Quentin hooks two fingers in the rolled cuff of Eliot's shirt and tugs just enough to disrupt his stirring. When Eliot turns his face up to look at Quentin, Quentin is smiling very faintly, but his eyes are sparkling for all they're worth. “Anything else you want to try?” Quentin says. “To, um, relax me?”

Eliot raises his eyebrows. “Really, right in front of my raisin bread?” he teases, but he certainly doesn't put a stop to it when Quentin leans over and kisses him.

Quentin kisses him pretty often, generally the same kind of kiss – warm and firm and familiar, the nonverbal equivalent of a fond inside joke between old friends. It's a good kiss, a kiss for all occasions, conveying _good morning_ and _goodnight_ and _I like you_ and _I'm changing the subject_ and _cheer up_ and _I'm here for you_ and practically whatever else Quentin feels the need to express without words.

This isn't that kiss, but Eliot still has no trouble at all translating it. He lets his lips part further as Quentin's tongue strokes tentatively, and then without any conscious memory of moving, Eliot finds himself standing between Quentin's legs, Quentin's elbow resting on his shoulder while Quentin's other hand coils through Eliot's hair. It's so quiet up here on their hilltop; Eliot can hear the dim buzz of grasshoppers outside, and the sound of their slick mouths pressing and shifting together, and the beating of his own heart.

When Eliot tries to move away, Quentin grabs for his jaw and pulls him back in. Eliot laughs softly at the unexpectedness of it and obliges him with another, briefer kiss before drawing back again. “Hmm,” Eliot says. “A few extra inches of height really puts you in touch with your inner top.”

“Do I have an inner top?” Quentin says. “I mean – why is it _inner_ , necessarily?”

“No offense intended,” Eliot says quickly.

“No, I know – I mean – I'm not offended? I just don't-- You can't be saying that the taller person always tops, like some kind of rule or whatever.”

Eliot rests his hand on Quentin's thigh, fingertips stroking in what he hopes is a soothing manner. “No, that's-- There's no rule. And I wouldn't say it has to do with who's taller, but it maybe has to do with...who wants to be taller.” Quentin frowns as if he suspects Eliot of being random or obtuse on purpose, so Eliot supposes he needs to justify himself, even though this is not quite the circumstances he imagined for their first conversation about – this. “Bottoming is kind of – intense, and you have to be either really trusting or just good at letting go of the need to force things, and people who like it tend to be – they tend to have that fantasy of being – I don't know. Wrapped up. Handled. Taken care of. Topping can feel like a power rush, but also a lot of responsibility for someone else's experience, and it kind of makes sense that most tops like the idea of being with someone who can – look up to them, including but not limited to the literal sense. It doesn't matter how tall you actually are, only – how tall you _feel_ when you're turned on.”

Quentin's little frown doesn't go away, but he turns that over for a minute, giving it due consideration. “I don't know,” he finally says, “that just sounds – reductive to me. And pretty heteronormative, to be honest?”

“ _Heteronormative_ ,” Eliot repeats with a roll of his eyes. “Look who started sucking cock a few months ago and is suddenly a Queer Studies major.”

There's still something disapproving in Quentin's expression, but he can't quite resist the pull of a smile at the corners of his lips. “Gosh, El,” he says with perfect deadpan innocence, “do you really think I'm good enough to _major_?”

“Oh, I think you're very good,” Eliot says, sliding both hands along Quentin's shoulders and up to cradle his neck. “That's how you get away with being such a brat.” From the pleasure in Quentin's smile and the increased confidence in his next few kisses, he takes it as entirely a compliment. Come to think of it, Eliot probably hasn't – said that very often, at least not outside a context like this, backhanded and half-joking. He pulls back just enough to make himself heard, and he strokes the heel of his hand over Quentin's cheek and says, short of breath but as seriously as he can manage, “You're so good. At all of it.”

“Good teacher,” Quentin says gallantly, tilting his head to kiss the base of Eliot's thumb while still trying to keep eye contact. “So, um. Which one do you like better?”

It takes Eliot a second to flip back a page or two in his mind and remember-- Ah. Right. “Oh, you know me,” he says lightly. “I'll do anything.”

“Okay, but the question--” is as much as Quentin gets out before Eliot gets his hands around Quentin's face again and pulls him back into a kiss. Or two or three kisses. Or maybe a few more. When Quentin finally pulls back, Eliot kind of can't look away from his flushed, slickened lips; it's been the better part of a year, and Eliot is still gobsmacked by Quentin's lips and the fact that they're available for Eliot to kiss more or less at any time. He hasn't been this addled by anything sexual since he was sixteen, with a few tattered shreds of his virginity left intact. “El,” Quentin murmurs, husky and short of breath, nuzzling against the line of Eliot's stubble. “God, take me to bed right now.”

And it's been a long time since Eliot possessed anything resembling virginity, but the narrow bed and the slanted afternoon sunlight give Eliot fond flashbacks to a life he never lived, artless stolen kisses and hands hastily pushed under waistbands while homework goes undone. In that other life, Eliot could have been naive enough to think _boyfriend_ and _sweetheart_ and _when we get out of this town together_. Here in this life he bites Quentin's throat hard enough to bruise and he thrusts between Quentin's thighs and he lets Quentin pull his hair too hard and he kisses and kisses Quentin for all the innocent crushes he never had and the high-school hookups that were nothing like this ( _how many boyfriends have you had, Eliot? Mine or other people's?_ ), and for the shitty first apartment he never shared with anyone and the tender makeup sex he would've had if he didn't bolt at the first sign of conflict ( _this is my boyfriend, hey, have you met my boyfriend?_ ) and, what the hell, for the wedding he maybe could've had someday that didn't come at the tip of a blade, where Margo cries because she's happy for him and not like he's on his deathbed. He kisses Quentin for everything they're not, and there's something about Quentin – some inexplicable way that when Quentin kisses him, Eliot gets just as taste of all of that back. The things Eliot never got and the things he never will. All the beautiful things Quentin believes without question that Eliot deserves.

He lies in the stuffy summer darkness afterwards, his right hand going numb where it's tucked under Quentin's back, feeling the edge of Quentin's fingernails trace up and down the curve of his shoulderblade, and he thinks about dinner and about how many more days til he siphons the new wine and about the ghostly beauty of lives that don't belong to him and the clumsy, primitive beauty of this one just the way it is.

“You know what we should do?” Quentin says. Eliot doesn't know, and he makes a noise to that general effect and shifts around with his arm tucked under his head so he can watch Quentin's face as they talk. “Let's knock off early tomorrow and go down to the village. That tavern you go to, they serve food, right?”

They do. “Quentin Coldwater,” Eliot says, carefully enunciating through his post-coital sleep mumble. “Are you asking me on a date?”

Quentin laughs. “Maybe I am,” he says, tucking Eliot's messy, untrimmed curls behind his ear for him. “What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Eliot admits. “I just thought you didn't like going down to the village.”

“I don't know, it's not my favorite thing,” Quentin says. “The way everyone stares is disconcerting. But – I'm trying to think of ways to, um. To practice self-care, I guess. And I thought a change of scenery....”

“It's a good idea,” Eliot says.

Warmed by the affirmation, Quentin says, “Honestly, why, why shouldn't we-- You know, all my life, the biggest thing I ever wanted was to see Fillory, and now I'm here, I _live_ here, and I never get to – I've hardly gotten to see it at all. What if we-- You know, if we go back to the same point in the future whenever we're done here, then what does it even matter, right? Like a, a few months, or a year, that basically costs us nothing, and especially if we go over the winter, when half the time we can't even work on the Mosaic because of the snow and ice.”

It's possible Eliot's brain isn't fully present yet. “Go...where?” he says.

“I don't know, go anywhere! It's _Fillory_ , and there's still magic. We could see the Great Salt River or the Flying Forest – find Chatwin's Torrent again – you've been to the Outer Islands now, but I haven't, what if this is my only chance?”

Eliot can't help but chuckle as Quentin winds himself up in intensity. He pets through Quentin's chest hair and says, “I thought reality had knocked a little shine off of Fillory for you.”

Quentin sighs. “I mean...our Fillory sucks, a little bit. Or, not-- I don't mean it sucks. But this isn't-- El, this is Fillory _before_. Before the Beast, and even before all the stories got filtered through Plover, and before Ember and Umber were separated. I think things are...more in balance in this time period. More pure. I think this is how Fillory was _supposed_ to be, and nobody in our world gets to see it except us. You don't understand how long I've wanted this,” he adds, the intensity dropping off abruptly into wistfulness.

Eliot thinks he does understand, but he doesn't say so – doesn't say anything about how long those unlived lives can keep haunting your dreams. “Are you serious about this?” he says instead.

They wouldn't be traveling as kings. It might be rough going here and there, making their way through Fillory's gallery of whimsical-but-maybe-deadly eccentricities with magic and quick thinking, and when they came back they'd have to start almost all over again building up their stores and putting the house in order. There could even be new questers by then, and wouldn't _that_ be awkward? There are probably dozens of reasons not to just – fuck off without a plan or a destination, and no real reason to do it, except that.... Well, it might be fun? Quentin would love it, and tell Eliot everything about the books in that adorably stumbling, overeager way of his. They'd get a few stories of their own that would be worth telling, once they finally make it home. Eliot should probably not romanticize the whole adventure concept at this point, but if Quentin is right, if this is a more innocent Fillory with chaos and order still in balance....

Because the opposite of leaving is the opposite of fun: being tethered to this one place, this one life, day after day and season after season for years now, and however many years left to come. Yes, Eliot is – happy at times, he's found things to like about seeing the flowers he planted bloom and looking forward to plum wine, but he didn't love being tied to the farm in Indiana and he didn't love being tied to the throne room in Whitespire, and everything he does love about life in Fillory – the superabundance of stars and the taste of food that always holds notes of woodfire and smoke and the way that Quentin fits in Eliot's arms – all of that can be taken on the road. Leaving home to seek their fortunes, isn't that what the stories always say? And they'll come back, of course they'll come back, but magic doesn't _own_ them and this quest isn't allowed to dictate everything about their lives, because Eliot has never ceded that power to anyone or anything. He is who he says he is, and he chooses how he wants to live; he's a weak man in many, many ways, but that's his strength. It always has been.

“Well,” Quentin says with a little smile. “I'm serious about dinner at the tavern, anyway.”

So – that's that. Eliot's glad, actually, because it was probably never going to happen, and Eliot can't take the blame now that Quentin's said it first. It was never really an option at all, because of course it wasn't. They don't have _options_. “Well, thanks for the escapist fantasy, anyway,” Eliot says as he sits up.

He can hear Quentin's huffy sigh behind him, but he doesn't look back. He just busies himself finding his clothes on the floor and shaking the straw out of them. “I mean, is that the worst thing in the world?” Quentin demands. “We're doing all the right things, the, the _responsible_ , the adult things, why is it so terrible to think about.... You understand that we could _die_ here, don't you? But we're not supposed to think about that, we're just supposed to keep pushing this goddamn boulder up the hill and calling it a quest, and then on top of that, what, you think I should feel guilty for just pretending for a few minutes that we might actually get to live our lives? Who the hell deserves a little escapism more than we do?”

Quentin tries to touch Eliot, his fingers grazing Eliot's arm, but Eliot stands up and moves away to jerk his pants the rest of the way on. “None of this was on my vision board either, you know,” Eliot snaps.

“I know, I never said – come on, El, you can't be mad at me. What did I do?”

Eliot really has only the foggiest of ideas, but he _can_ be mad, and he _will_ if he feels like it. “Why are you always so fucking negative? Do you _have_ to talk about dying while I'm trying to have a goddamn afterglow?”

Behind him, Eliot is vaguely aware of Quentin sitting up in bed, knees pulled toward his chest and arms around them. “Okay,” he says, and he sounds tired. “Okay, yeah, that wasn't maybe – the most appropriate--”

Somehow the thought of Quentin apologizing just to shut Eliot up makes him ten times angrier than he was before. “You know this is just the unmedicated weasels in your brain talking, right?” he says as he buckles his belt.

“I don't really think it is,” Quentin says. “All I meant was--”

And God, Eliot doesn't want to _hear_ it, he doesn't want to hear anymore about Quentin's regrets. Eliot has too many of his own, he can't – he _won't_ carry Quentin's, too. “No, I know what you meant,” Eliot says. “You'd rather be sailing to a tropical paradise right now? Guess what, so would I, but that doesn't mean-- Things are just never as dire and hopeless as you insist on making them, Quentin, you just _refuse_ to make the best of anything and it's really goddamn tiring, you know that?”

Afterglow well and truly ruined now, Quentin follows Eliot's lead, getting out of bed and getting dressed. “I don't really appreciate you putting words in my mouth,” he says to Eliot's back. “I feel like you're picking this fight over things I didn't even say, so like, do I really have to even be here for this, or do you just have this whole argument handled on your own?”

“This isn't an argument,” Eliot says. “You said we don't get to live our lives unless and until we ever get out of here, so why would I argue with you about that? I don't even disagree, I just think you're being a whiny bitch about it.” He stalks out of the cabin with Quentin on his heels, Jesus Christ, can a man not make a _dramatic exit_? All Eliot wants is a drink, a fucking _actual drink_ , or maybe ten or twelve drinks and a fistful of something that makes the world sparkle, that might make him forget for two seconds that he's imprisoned in an existentialist play about a doomed marriage. “We could be done tomorrow, for all you know,” Eliot growls. He doesn't even know who he's talking to. He doesn't know who he thinks he's fooling. “We can't just throw away all this time we've invested. If you want to live your life, live it here.”

Still behind him, Quentin is silent for a moment, and then he says with a heavy dare in his voice, “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You know exactly what it means,” Eliot mutters, punting on the dare. He's angry, yes, but there's still – so much he can't say. Too much that he needs, because they're not going to be done tomorrow, and for once Eliot doesn't have the luxury of burning something to the ground and running away when things start to matter.

This _matters_ , Quentin _matters_ , and that's somehow worse than falling in love, because a broken heart is just good theater, but the things you need make you vulnerable in the worst possible ways. So how can Eliot possibly answer a question like that? He can't say _I've waited my whole life for someone to say let's run away together, just you and me, and you said it and you didn't mean it and you say all these things, the most beautiful things, and you don't mean them, I can't believe you ever really mean them, and I know for a fact you have no idea what they mean to me_.

Okay, technically he _could_ say that. But he won't.

The next thing he hears is the sound of something falling or breaking or, whatever, just coming apart, and it makes Eliot jump half out of his skin, because he lives in constant dread of things breaking, things he doesn't know how to fix. But when he turns, he sees that it's Quentin, doubling down on that goddamn dare of his. “Oops,” Quentin says flatly, his eyes chilly with that particular kind of anger that Quentin gets when he's being ignored or dismissed, when people are going over his head. It's Quentin's version of pride, Eliot knows, not flashy or fiery, but once you've broken your head open on it once or twice, you recognize the solidity of it.

Eliot almost admires it. He almost smiles and reaches for Quentin's neck and makes some tension-defusing joke about sulky cats, but then he glances down again, and he sees that one of the tiles has fractured cleanly in half, and it's like being dunked in ice water.

They can't wreck this. Eliot can and has wrecked practically everything he's ever touched, but – this can't be how they fail, how they fail each other and the world and everyone they love – how everything that's worth something about the two of them turns into guilt and blame and failure. They can't, this can't-- Eliot picks up the broken tile; Quentin stares at it, pale and a little shocky, and Eliot knows he's doing all the same mental math in his head, calculating what a hotheaded mistake like this could cost them both. “I can fix that,” Quentin says.

It's not that Eliot wants to make things worse. It's not that he ever really _wants_ to wreck shit. But he feels – almost transported outside of his body by the fear and the anger, like he's just vacated the premises and let everything he never wanted to be walk right in and take over. He steps closer to Quentin, looms over him, and says in a hard voice he barely recognizes, “If we die here, it won't be my fault. I'm not fucking up the Mosaic. _I didn't break magic_.”

Quentin can't even look him in the eye. He takes the tile in both hands and tugs it away from Eliot. “I can fix it, okay?” he says, but his voice trembles a little, all his defiance vanished at once. “Just – calm down. I'll fix it.”

What Quentin does barely looks like magic at all, it's so smooth and seamless. He just fits the pieces together and smooths the crack closed with his thumb, the sandy innards of it disappearing under an unblemished sky blue veneer. Good as new.

Eliot's only twenty-seven. He doesn't know when _new_ got to be so long ago that he can't even remember what it felt like. He thinks it felt lonely.

He's not sure now if Quentin will let Eliot touch him at all, but when Eliot puts his hand on the back of Quentin's neck and shuffles closer, Quentin leans in, holding the tile between their bodies with one hand, anchoring the other arm around Eliot's waist. Eliot kisses the top of his head. “I'm sorry,” Quentin says.

“Me, too,” Eliot says.

“I get homesick,” Quentin says. “And I'm – not very patient, I guess. I get frustrated, but when I say stupid things, when I make it sound like – this isn't real life, or that you're not – real enough to me, you have to kind of – please just assume that I'm not thinking straight. Call me out on it or whatever, that's fine, but I need – you have to give me a chance to make it right. El, you're all I have.”

“Yeah, okay,” Eliot says. What choice does he have? He can't say _all your yeses aren't enough for me because I know you can't afford to say no, I wish you could have all the adventures your heart desires, all the lovers, all the lifetimes, because if you came to me then, if you chose me out of all of it, I think I could believe that you're everything you say you are_.

Well, he _can_. But he won't.

Instead he says, “Are you hungry? You want some of the gumbo?”

Quentin releases a soft breath against Eliot's collarbone. It might be a chuckle. “Stop calling it gumbo,” he says.

“It's not _not_ gumbo,” Eliot insists. “It's effectively....” He shrugs, and the sensation of maybe being shaken off makes Quentin hang on tighter. “It's close enough,” Eliot says, because he truly does believe that when you factor in the limits of what's available to them, it's – really pretty close to the real thing.


	5. Three Years (I)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I originally meant to post chapters 5 and 6 together, because they happen more or less at once and are only two chapters because of POV issues. However, personal life has really delayed this story, and I felt like it would be just a ridiculous time gap if I waited until chapter 6 was also done. So what that means for you is, if you're reading this as a WIP, you might get a more complete sense of what's going on at this moment in time if you waited to read 5 and 6 together. But also I could personally not wait that long to post, so if you can't wait that long to read it, you are super valid, godspeed, and I got you.

At first Ari handles the breakup like a champ, all wry smiles and charmingly backhanded disparagment of her lumbering dim-bulb of an ex, and Eliot couldn't be prouder of her. That lasts a couple of weeks.

Who knows what Quentin says to set her off, but the two of them are lazing in the grass braiding garlic bulbs and chatting one minute, and then the next minute Eliot hears a noise that makes him look up from the Mosaic, and it's Arielle with her apron pulled up over her face, weeping despondently into it while Quentin looks like he's about to fully panic out of his skin. Eliot stands up and brushes chalk dust onto his pants, stifling a sigh. He has to do everything around here.

“All right, all right,” Eliot says, kneeling down beside Ari and putting his arm around her shoulders. “It's all right, let it out. Q, go get her some water.”

“I'm sorry,” she says after a minute, wiping her nose on her apron and tendrils of ginger curls off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I'm sorry, I don't know why – I don't even miss him, I just feel, I feel so _stupid_. Everyone knew, everyone else told me-- And _I_ knew! That's the worst part. Every time he asked me to marry him, I put him off, because I knew he wasn't – wasn't reliable, but I thought....”

“You're not the slightest bit stupid,” Eliot assures her. “You just saw the best in him, that's a good thing. It's not your fault the best version of him wasn't – you know, actually _him_. That's his fucking problem, right?” She nods hesitantly, and Eliot squeezes her shoulders. “No more projects,” Eliot tells her firmly. “We're looking for a finished product next time, not potential, right?”

Quentin's back with a skin full of water, and he hands it down to Arielle with a deeply serious expression on his face like she's in the hospital or something. Ari takes it silently from his hands, gazing up at him just as seriously with tear-pink eyes and flush-pink cheeks, so that's – happening a little faster than Eliot expected.

Which is fine. Maybe better than dragging everything out and giving everyone a chance to curl in on themselves and gnaw on their feelings. Cleaner.

“All right,” he says again, jostling Arielle's shoulder with his own. “You're going to be staying for dinner--”

“Oh, I can't, not so late,” Ari says.

“You can and, in addition, you are,” Eliot says. “So come on, on your feet. You're going to go sit right there at the table and play a few hands of battalion with Quentin, and I'm going to figure out what I'm serving at this party.”

“I can't put you two out like that,” she protests as he helps her to her feet.

Eliot touches his finger and thumb to the tip of her chin. “It's not a negotiation,” he informs her gently. “This is the plan.”

“You better just, uh, you should give in, probably,” Quentin says. “That's what I usually do.”

The excuse about menu-planning was pretty much a lie; Eliot doesn't need extra time for that, he could do it in his sleep. He just needs a few minutes in private to pull everything together, and to – gnaw on his feelings briefly. So he takes his time going down to cold storage for potatoes and eggs and butter and onions, and he sharpens his knife before he starts dicing the potatoes, dragging everything out on purpose while he gives himself the talking-to that he richly deserves.

None of this is unexpected. None of this is anything that Eliot hasn't been prepared for since – practically the beginning. Lunk is – well, he grew on Eliot a bit over time, but he's still a fuckboy and will probably die a fuckboy, so that relationship was never going to last, in spite of the best intentions of both people involved. And now Arielle is wounded-yet-brave, which is actual catnip to Quentin, re-activating his old crush like a bolt of lightning animating the Bride of Frankenstein.

Eliot's always liked Ari, and he's always liked Ari for Quentin. Those facts have been entered into the record ages ago, and there's no going back now.

Yes, it'll change things. It will, and that's – never easy. Fine. Eliot can do hard things.

What it means to love somebody... it's not what Eliot ever thought it was before. He's not sure that he knows what it means even now; years of living with it should have stripped away all love's secrets, but instead the whole phenomenon is more mysterious to him than ever, beautiful in the strange, ungraspable way of surrealism, or mysticism. Eliot only knows that after living his entire life obsessed with his own hungers, his cravings for food and sex and attention and glory and vengeance and validation – after all of that, he feels fully sated by Quentin's simple presence, and for the first time in Eliot's life, the absence of hunger doesn't feel hauntingly temporary.

Quentin, at the risk of a double entendre, fills Eliot entirely. It's a gift all the more miraculous for being entirely accidental, but the repayment of it – that, Eliot can't leave to chance and accident. If he's ever going to be the man he imagines being, he can't allow Quentin to want for anything.

It doesn't feel easy, but it doesn't feel impossible, either. He can do hard things.

Sufficiently pep-talked, Eliot takes himself back out to the realm of society. He sits down at the table beside Quentin, who is not so infatuated that he's letting Arielle win at battalion, an army of mice complete with officers and artillery terrorizing her poor contingent of owlish petty nobility. Quentin sweeps the table with the casual air of a man who is never surprised to find himself winning at cards. “Welcome to my world,” Eliot tells Ari, genuinely sympathetic. “Here, deal me in this hand, we'll gang up on him. But I want to be owls; I'm feeling predatory.”

“Who's the more dangerous predator?” Arielle says. “I'd say it's humankind.”

“Fair point,” Eliot says, “but I like to fly.” He tries not to gawk at Quentin's deft hands as he flips through the deck in a one-handed blackjack shuffle before sorting out the courts with rapid, careless flicks of his thumb. If Quentin did shit like that to make people gawk at his sexy hands, it would seem cocky, even faintly embarrassing for him. The fact that he does it because he truly, profoundly loves the tactile experience of a deck of cards in his hands is – awful, just awful. _Devastating_.

Well. Anyway.

There's an element of strategy to battalion, but a greater element of luck; the suits and numbers you're dealt determine how quickly you can get your court on the table and ready to attack. It's appalling that Quentin wins as often as he does; Eliot is sometimes suspicious that he cheats, but Quentin's the sort who wouldn't view it as a victory if he didn't play fair.

He's a good man. He's even very tolerant of Eliot's weaknesses every time he catches Eliot using magic to cheat.

They've played with all three courts on the table before, but not often, and it throws Quentin's rhythm off a bit. He plays too conservatively, holding his best cards in reserve for emergencies, and it's the wrong approach against a united front of Eliot and Arielle, both with scores to settle. “Am I losing?” he says at one point, faintly frowning at the table like he's flickering between dimensions and can't tell what's real anymore.

“Would it make you happier to think that I'm winning?” Arielle says.

Quentin smiles softly at her and says, “Maybe, yeah.”

“Ari, finish me off, will you, sweetheart?” Eliot says. “I long for death, and it's time for me to start the eggs anyway.” She does so gladly, absorbing all Eliot's pips and using them to effectively nuke Quentin's defensive line.

Eliot's cooking has improved dramatically since the first time they had company up here; he fries the potatoes and scrambles in the eggs and the peppers over the open fire, and he gets the perfect cast-iron char on the whole thing without drying out the eggs or burning the shit out of his hands for once. Little burns like that are fixable if you have even a modicum of healing talent, and a modicum is exactly how much healing talent Quentin has, so it's never a big deal, but it's painful at the time and painful to endure Quentin bitching at him for two hours afterward about being more careful.

_That won't change_ , Eliot reminds himself. _Not everything will change_.

For dessert Eliot begins the slow process of caramelizing onion quarters in a glaze of fruit vinegar, which started out mostly as a way to use up discarded peels and overripe peaches and plums, but has actually turned into the most intriguing of Eliot's fermentation experiments. Arielle looks dubious about eating an onion for dessert, and Eliot realizes that she's been on the business end of some of his more ill-conceived culinary experiments in the past (as has Quentin, but Quentin has no palate and doesn't care what you serve him; Ari has some sense), but he swears on his life that this is a life-changing delicacy, and she's too polite to refuse at least a taste.

It does, however, take ages for the onion to cook down and develop that plummy candied crust. That's no disadvantage, really, not the way Eliot sees it. What else are they going to spend their evenings doing, if not stargazing by the fire and lovingly tending the onions? It's an event-food. It's an experience. Ari and Quentin lounge in the grass sampling Eliot's plum brandy, their bodies canted toward each other without either of them appearing to plan it, or even notice. It's sweet; they're sweet together, the way they sparkle shyly into one another's eyes, and Eliot feels....

He wonders what it would be like, to fall toward someone with – so little effort. For something to unfold so naturally that you hardly even notice it as it happens. Every time Eliot's ever caught feelings, it was all claustrophobia and adrenaline like a mountain falling in on him. Sometimes he envies this power that Quentin has to slip through the cracks of a heart, a little Mouse King invading the granary, taking what he needs in little bite-sized pieces.

Ari wants Eliot to teach her another Earth song, so he takes advantage of her range by leading her through Defying Gravity. Eliot can only manage the high notes by straining the edges of his falsetto, but he coaxes her with little motions of his fingers like he's dangling a cat toy over her nose, and she goes up and up to meet him and pass him, high and clear and satisfying. “I like it,” she says unnecessarily, glowing with moonlight and pleasure. “But is it – a happy song, or a sad one?”

Eliot shrugs. “Neither. Both. It's just – about changing.”

“It's very complicated,” Arielle says. “A lot of Fillorian songs are just about sex or flowers.”

“Common themes among our people, as well,” Eliot assures her.

Quentin snorts and says, “ _Name one song_ about _flowers_.”

“Edelweiss, bitch,” Eliot drawls.

“Oh, come on, that doesn't count,” Quentin says.

“You really want to step to me on Rogers and Hammerstein?” Eliot says, delighted and appalled in equal measure. “Is that really the decision you're making here?”

Quentin laughs, but he forges on undeterred. “Sorry to spoil your childhood innocence,” says Quentin – _Quentin Coldwater_ – “but it's not about flowers, it's about Nazis.”

“What are Nazis?” Arielle asks.

“Um, they were – an army,” Quentin says. “On our world, they – they tried to conquer everything, there was – a big war. And they were, you know, bad. Cruel. They were led by a tyrant and a – a kind of cabal of dark Magicians.”

“Oh, fuck that,” Eliot says. “People always want to blame Magicians, like fascism needs some kind of evil spell to explain it. Or any other kind of hatefulness. That's just human.”

“ _Magicians_ are human,” Quentin says. “And you can't tell me there weren't Magicians in the Third Reich; there are fascist Magicians _now_.”

“There are Magicians everywhere, but that doesn't mean magic created--”

“I didn't say _created_ \--”

“I don't understand where the flowers come in,” Arielle says over both of them, aggressively pleasant. Sweetheart.

It breaks the tension. Quentin pours himself a little more brandy and says, “It's kind of a long story, but I bet Eliot will tell it for us if you ask him nicely.”

Ari beams at him and says, “Eliot, will you tell us the story about the cruel tyrant's army and the flowers?”

He can't help but laugh. “Okay, but you have to promise that every time Q tries to interrupt me because he thinks I'm telling it wrong, you have to pinch his ears and pull his hair. It's the only way he'll learn.”

“I won't say a word,” Quentin says solemnly. “The stage is yours.”

Eliot hums and scrapes up the onions, shuffling them around the pan a bit before he begins. “The story is about an elegant, beautiful young woman with golden hair named Elsa who lived in a great city called Vienna.”

“What?” Quentin says. “No, it's--”

Arielle immediately leans over and pinches Quentin's wrist, apparently pretty hard from the sound he makes. “Go on, Eliot,” she says.

“Thank you, darling. As a young woman, barely more than a girl, she's pressured into a loveless marriage with an elderly Baron, but the advantage to that is that when the Baron dies, she's still a vibrant woman, now with a royal title and a fortune at her disposal. So for many years, she makes up for the youth she never had – she travels the world and takes lovers and throws the grandest parties in Vienna and wears the finest clothes and is loved by everyone who's anyone in society. And Elsa loves her freedom, so she's in no hurry to enter another marriage with a man who will become the legal owner of all her land and fortune. Why should she? She has the world at her feet.”

“I can't believe you,” Quentin laughs softly.

“Hush,” Eliot says. “I'm telling a story. But of course, what happens is what inevitably happens – Elsa meets a man, a powerful and dashing war hero, and while he starts out just another lover, she slowly begins to fall in love with him. He's a rich man in his own right, with a palatial estate in the mountains by a great lake, so Elsa knows he isn't interested in her wealth. He comes to visit her in Vienna again and again, and he seems to feel the same way she does. He tells her she's the joy of his life, that she's the woman who saved his heart and gave him hope again after the death of his first wife, and Elsa knows better than to rely on some man's declarations, but it feels so right when he comes to stay with her, and she starts to imagine how perfect it might be, if the two of them consolidated their fortunes. If they stayed together forever. So she lets her guard down. She starts to think about a future with more in it than her freedom. And when he asks her to come to his estate and meet his seven children, she believes it's the beginning of something real, something permanent.”

“But she's been deceived?” Arielle guesses, a little bit of the raw aftermath of her tears coming out in her voice. “Is he really a Nazi in disguise, tricking her out of her fortune?”

“Not at all,” Eliot says, carefully not letting his eyes drift away from the fire and toward anyone in particular. “He's a good man, and he cares for Elsa very much. But when Elsa arrives at his home, she realizes that there is another woman – a poor but kind-hearted mountain girl who's governess to the Captain's children. And although Elsa is nothing but gracious and good to the children, of course they're loyal to the woman who's all but a mother to them. She hopes to win them over, but the longer she's there, the more she realizes that it isn't just the children – that the Captain, as much as he cares for Elsa and sees the many benefits of marrying her...is deeply in love with the governess. And Elsa – loves her freedom, and she would have traded it for love, but not for lies. So she exposes it all to the light. She tells the governess that the Captain loves her, and she gracefully allows the Captain to end their engagement without fault, and she tells him, too, that the mountain girl would have him if he asked her. Which he does, and they marry and are desperately happy together.”

“Yeah, it's a famous Earth tragedy,” Quentin says dryly.

“All depends on your point of view, doesn't it?” Eliot says. “But I don't think it's a tragedy. Elsa knows who she is, and she won't trade her integrity for any reason. She loves the Captain and they did make each other happy, but she won't have him if it's not – if she's not everything to him. I think she's brave and honest and proud.”

There's a silent moment by the fire before Arielle says, “Was this – the story about the war and the flower?”

“Oh, right, there is a B-plot,” Eliot says lightly. “Where Nazis conquer Austria and try to draft the Captain into their army. He and his wife and their children escape on foot through the mountains, and Edelweiss is a kind of little mountain wildflower, so the song is metaphorically about how pure and resilient Austria and simple Austrian mountain girls are, and how the Nazis can roll in their war machine but they can't take away what makes the good, honest things good. Or something.”

“Oh,” Arielle says. “Well, that's. That's a good story.”

“Ari, he's messing with you,” Quentin says. “He's twisting it all around on purpose.”

“I'm telling it the way I heard it,” Eliot says. “We didn't all want to grow up to be Marias, you know.”

“I could see you as an Elsa,” Quentin says, sounding indulgent. “The toast of Vienna. And actually, I think I like it the way you tell it. The integrity versus love thing, framing it as like an inner moral thing, like a struggle for Elsa's soul. It's creative.”

The onions are ready by then, and Quentin is as eager to see Arielle try them for the first time as Eliot is – more eager, possibly, judging by the way he playfully insists on hand-feeding her the first bite while she keeps her eyes closed. She can't see him, but she smiles around the tips of his fingers like somehow she knows he's smiling at her. Neither of them know the half of how lovely they are, and there's some kind of a fairy tale in that, Eliot thinks. It's certainly not a quality he expects to find in real people. And yet here they are, both as real as anything in the world, brandy-drunk and smelling like onions, little Mouse King and the mountain girl. Devastating.

She insists that Quentin tell a story, too, and of course he's willing. He lies back in the grass and thinks for a minute or two before he begins, “Once upon a time... there was a good and kind young lord of a small, wild land called Carterhaugh, a widower with one small, wild daughter called Janet. Everyone who knew him thought he should remarry to give Janet a mother, and to give him a son to inherit Carterhaugh one day, but Lord Carter refused. He married once for love, and he wouldn't marry again for any less, and anyway he saw no reason Janet shouldn't be the rightful heir of Carterhaugh, since she was as strong and clever and bold as any lord he'd ever known. So he gave her the best education in the world, and he let her run among all the knights of his household, who looked after her like uncles, and Janet was fearless and happy and maybe just a little prone to thinking she was invulnerable.

“Janet was also not used to hearing the word _no_ , so as she got older she started to question why she wasn't allowed to go very far into Carterhaugh Woods – never so far that she lost sight of the treeline, even though there was a broad and easy path that led deep into the woods. Bit by bit, as she pestered the knights and the servants, the truth came out. By the king's law, Carterhaugh Woods belonged to Lord Carter, but in reality, it was claimed by the Fairy Queen as part of her domain. And anyone who traveled the road into the woods would soon come upon a place called Miles Cross, a crossroads with a well, where the Fairy Queen's knights would extract a heavy toll from trespassers.”

“Fairies are very wicked,” Arielle says breathlessly. “Surely everyone knows that?”

Quentin grins up at the stars. “Well, did I mention that Janet wasn't very used to being told no? So being warned about fairies – well, she kind of took that as a dare, and one day she took a golden brooch to pay the Fairy Queen's toll and rode straight through the middle of Carterhaugh Woods in search of Miles Cross. And when she found it, she was overcome with how beautiful it was, a sunlit glade in the middle of the shadowy forest, and a well with a rosebush growing beside it, where every single rose had a double head on it. They were the rarest and finest roses Janet could imagine, so she snapped one off and put it in her hair.

“No sooner had Janet broken off the rose than she heard a voice say, _Who would steal a fairy rose, without so much as a may-I-please?_ And it was a deep, shivery, otherworldly sort of voice, but Janet's temper flashed up quicker than her fear, and she whirled around and said, _I'm Janet, Lord Carter's daughter, and it's my rose to take, if it's anyone's_. Then she saw the fairy knight, and she wasn't angry anymore. She was struck through the heart with his strange and terrible beauty – he was tall and slender with elegant features, wrapped in green brocade and a rich green cloak, with curls as dark as the wood of Carterhaugh and eyes that were green and gold like the sun shining through the leaves above Miles Cross.”

“Okay, settle down,” Eliot says dryly.

Quentin flashes him a smile that's quick andd slippery, plum brandy and starlight. “She was attracted to him, is the point I'm trying to stress.”

“We got that,” Eliot says while Arielle giggles tipsily.

“Okay, anyway, it's my turn?” Quentin says. “Right, so, not to like offend your sensibilities or anything, but this is kind of the good part. The knight says, _Well, Janet Carter, I hope you've brought gold to settle your debt_. And bold Janet who always gets what she wants, she takes that gold brooch out of her pocket and throws it straight down the well, then looks him in the eye and says, _No, but maybe there's something else you'd like?_ And that's how Janet began to tryst with a fairy knight named Tam Lin.”

“Tryst, huh?” Eliot says. “That's such a Fillorian way to say it.”

“Or for our Earth listeners,” Quentin says, “how Janet started hooking up with a fairy. Happy?”

“Absolutely,” Eliot says. “I was afraid for a minute there this story was going to get mushy.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “I think it's a good story,” Arielle assures him. “What happens next?”

“Well, she goes back, of course,” Quentin says. “Every day, all summer long, and they make love in the grass and they lie side by side and talk and Tam Lin weaves crowns of double-headed roses for Janet's hair, and they basically kind of – live in their own perfect little world. But the days start to get shorter, and Janet keeps having to go home earlier, and then soon she takes ill and for a while she can't go to meet her lover at all. She can barely get out of bed, she's so weak and nauseous all the time. And the rumors start, but everyone is afraid to say a word against Lord Carter's beloved daughter, at least not to her face. But she can't hide it forever, and finally her father comes to sit by her sickbed, and he takes her hands and says, _my darling Janet, I think we both know what's wrong, but you're my heart and my life, and I'll never blame you or let this bring you to harm. Just name the father of your child – it doesn't even matter if it's the true father; choose the knight you like best, and I'll see to it that he stands by you and claims the babe as his own_. But Janet swears to him on her mother's grave that not one of his knights is her child's father or ever will get to claim her or the child. He pleads with her to avoid a scandal, to think of her reputation and her child's. He tells her that it's harder than she thinks, spending her life alone, and she'd be wise to take the chance now to be wed and to have a partner in the running of Carterhaugh and the raising of her family. But Janet doesn't really listen, right? She never has, and the truth is that by now she's in love with Tam Lin and she can't imagine marrying anyone else, no matter what the practical benefits might be.

“Finally she's well enough to make the trip back to Miles Cross. It's almost All Soul's Night – late fall, the festival of the dead at the end of harvest, when people lock their doors and windows at sunset and the fairies ride on a hunt for lost souls. At first Tam Lin is angry with Janet, thinking she abandoned him, but she tells him everything that's happened, and he holds her while she cries, and he apologizes for bringing trouble on her and her house. But she won't hear any apology; she'd do the same all over again, do anything at all if it meant they could be together, but of course a fairy can't live in the mortal world.

“Except Tam Lin has one secret he's kept from her – he's not a fairy, not really. He was born a human nobleman, and stolen by the fairies as a boy when his horse threw him on a hunt and he wandered into forbidden fairy lands. He never minded that much, since the Fairy Queen was kind to him and treated him like a kind of pet, and since the fairy court was full of ease and luxury. But there was a dark price for the bliss of fairyland; every seven years, the Queen sacrificed one of her subjects to the Beast of the Underworld in exchange for her unnatural magic. Tam Lin has seen it happen over and over, but lately he senses that the Queen is bored of him, and that she plans to sacrifice him after the hunt is done on All Soul's. So Janet and Tam Lin are running out of time.”

Arielle has bundled up tighter under her blanket, her hand between her cheek and the grass, her rapt eyes on Quentin's profile. “This isn't sad, is it?” she says. “I'm too drunk, I'll cry again if it's sad.”

Quentin puts his hand out and pats her calf. “Don't cry. Tam Lin knows how to break the spell that keeps him bound to the Fairy Queen, but it's dangerous. Lucky for him, his lover is Janet Carter, who doesn't get scared and doesn't believe in no. So he tells her what to do: she has to come to Miles Cross at midnight on All Soul's Eve, where the fairy hunt will cross over between worlds. Three knights will ride ahead of the Queen for her protection – the first will wear black armor and ride a black horse, the second will wear brown armor and ride a brown horse, and behind them will come a white knight on a white horse. She won't see his face, but she'll know it's him. And she has to jump up as he rides by and pull him off his horse, and then whatever happens, she must hang on tight and not let him go, not even for a moment. It won't be easy, but if she just doesn't let go, if the Queen sees that none of her magic is stronger than Janet's will, then she'll have to surrender her claim on Tam Lin.

“So that's what Janet does. She goes deep into Carterhaugh Woods on the most haunted, spirit-troubled night of the year, and she crouches by the well in silence, waiting and waiting. Finally she hears the jingle of bells as the fairy court rides up through the mist. She sees the black horse go past her, and then the brown, and when the white horse is level with her, she springs out from hiding and grabs the white rider, dragging him down from his horse and throwing her cloak over him and locking her arms around him. She can't even see his face; she just has to trust that he is who he says he is. And whoever he is, he thrashes and fights, roaring in what sounds like pain, but Janet holds on. Then he seems to grow bigger and stronger, and the roaring changes, until she's wrestling with a lion, his hot breath on her face while he roars. But Janet holds on. And then the white knight becomes smaller, narrow, and she has to grab for him with her hands, only to find she's holding a black snake that sinks its fangs into her arm over and over. And Janet's terrified and she can feel the poison numbing her arms, but she locks her hands and holds and holds. And then the snake changes into a blaze of flame, and Janet screams in pain, feeling her skin cook and split and blacken, and all she wants to do is run, but she stands her ground. She doesn't even know how to hold onto living fire, but she doesn't run. If this is how she dies, she figures, you know – at least she'll know she did everything she could for the man she loves.”

There's a silence after that, where Quentin seems to fall into wandering thought. Eliot looks up and counts the visible stars in the Dragon; all of the Nose is above the treeline, and all but the last star in the Dragon's Neck. He thinks about letting go, and holding on, and burning alive, and the little weedy wildflowers that come back every season – _small and white, clean and bright_. He thinks about stories. He thinks about onions. He thinks about the beauty of all life.

“And then everything goes dark,” Quentin says, husky and soft, like they've crossed a threshold into the deep night and he hates to break the silence on this side. “But when she opens her eyes, she's unburned, and lying in her lap, tangled in her cloak, there's her lover, naked and mortal and safe. And he's safe forever after that, the Fairy Queen's power broken now that Janet holds the claim on his heart and soul.”

“Yes,” Arielle says, surprisingly intensely. “Because she was loyal. Women are more loyal then men, don't you think?”

“I don't know,” Quentin says. “Maybe? I don't know. I haven't...always been.”

“You?” Arielle says. “No, I can't imagine you would ever betray--”

“But I did,” he says sharply. “I have. There was a woman – and I did betray her, and I hurt her, and I – tried for the longest time to make it right, but some things – when you break some things, they can't be unbroken, you know? And I think I didn't really believe that at the time, but I get it now. Some choices matter more than others, and it's not always easy to tell when you make a choice, whether it's one of those or not. Whether it's something you can try again if you fail at, or if it's one of the things that are just – permanent. A choice that changes things forever. You just. Don't always know. So you have to kind of – act like they're all permanent. Like every choice you make matters.”

“And you, Eliot?” she asks wistfully. “Have you always been faithful?”

He's at a loss for words momentarily. “Faithful?” he murmurs, gazing into the fire. “I – guess in a way I have. But mostly because...I don't make a lot of promises. Guess I'm not really – cut out for relationships, at the end of the day.”

“I don't believe you're as heartless as you make yourself sound,” Ari says.

“I'm not _heartless_ at all,” Eliot says. He remembers a time when he would've taken that as a compliment, but. That was years ago. “I guess I just think that...sex is a weird thing to pin your heart on, you know? Attraction is – so weird and random. Passion comes and goes. The people I've loved – it's not that there hasn't been sex and passion and all that, but. None of it really touches.... The people I love, I just love them. It's not something you can make or break by sticking your bits somewhere. It's just...a fact.”

“It matters,” Ari says. “It does.”

“To you,” Eliot says gently. “Not to me.”

They've crossed over now for good, pleasant drowsiness turned into the feeling of being weighed down by the darkness, the feeling of wandering lost in the night. It's long past too late, of course, for Arielle to go walking home alone, so Eliot helps her up and brings her inside the cabin, shakes out Quentin's blankets and does his best to make the bed up neatly for her.

When he's done, Arielle sits on the edge of the bed, looking around the cabin. “It's nicer than the last time I was in here,” she says. “Could still use some paint, though.”

“Well, we spend a lot more time outside,” Eliot says. “Good view out there.”

“Why doesn't Quentin ever come down to the village?”

“He does,” Eliot hedges.

“Hardly ever,” Arielle says.

It's not really Eliot's story to tell – Quentin's nerves, Quentin's moods, the quiet guilt that binds Quentin to the Mosaic even as he dreams of adventures. “No reason, really,” he says instead.

“You know....” Arielle says softly, looking down at her hands twisting in her skirt. “People talk.”

“Do they,” Eliot says.

“How could they not? A man like you, living up here alone with....”

He waits for her to finish, but he can't wait all night. He's tired. “What's a man like me?” he asks without any particular emotional charge. It's boring by now. The rote response to a knock-knock joke that's never actually funny.

Arielle glances up at him and shrugs. She doesn't bother to come up with an answer; maybe she can't think of one, or can't think of one that's suitable in the context of a friendship, anyway. “And you're alone up here, always,” she says, “and you – keep his house, and – if you're loyal to anything, if you ever have been, I know it's to him. It's so easy to see that, Eliot. And he's – so handsome. You know, they say – I've heard such things happen more in the city. They say it's a rich man's privilege, to take lovers with no eye to children to work alongside you, to keep you in your age.”

“I was a rich man, once,” Eliot says. “Maybe that explains it.”

He was the High King of Fillory once. Thrones and silks and servants and caskets full of, _rooms_ full of jewels. It's like a dream, from here. His hands smell like vinegar half the time.

Not that he wants to mythologize it. He paid dearly for that crown, and if any one of a hundred people had gotten their way, he'd have paid for it with his life. He might still, one day.

“Eliot,” she says earnestly. God, she's so earnest. She's so like Quentin. “I just – I need to know. Before I make a fool of myself, I need to know if his heart is already given.”

And that's how easy it would be, to put an end to this. To freeze the world, and to keep everything he has... keep it just as it is right now.

He's told lies before. Jesus, he's told millions of them. The state of his soul is whatever it is, and his integrity was eroded to nothing before he hit puberty. _How easy it would be._ One more lie among caskets full, rooms full of lies. Among a lifetime full of lies.

Eliot lies and he sleeps with other people's boyfriends and he swears oaths he doesn't mean and he cheats at cards. He can live with all of that, because he has to. But he can't – live with this. It would be easy, but also it would be – impossible.

“I knew the girl that Q was telling you about earlier,” he says. “I know...he blames himself for what happened, and yeah, maybe he fucked up. Okay. But there's so much he didn't tell you – the things he did for her. He saved her life. She couldn't forgive him, and she had a right-- Whatever. But he would never have let her go. He's the most loyal person I've ever known, and I know he cares about you. Whatever you...want to tell him. Or ask him. I don't know what his answer will be, but I know he won't make you feel like a fool. And it's not up to me, but for what it's worth, I think you'd be happy together. I really do.”

He tucks her in and sets a lantern of magical light that won't fade until dawn by the back door in case she needs the outhouse, and he coils one of her soft curls around his thumb, feeling unbearably tender toward this woman who's been his friend since before he knew he needed a friend, this too-loyal person who only wants to give her loyalty to someone who deserves it.

Outside, Quentin is sitting cross-legged on the daybed, with his damn shoes on. Eliot could strangle him. Quentin doesn't look at Eliot as he approaches, doesn't look up when Eliot comes to a standstill by the edge of the bed. “You're angry,” Eliot observes.

Quentin scrubs the heels of both hands into his eye sockets. “I don't know. I don't-- yeah? I guess?”

Eliot sits down on the edge of the bed, prepared for a conversation, or prepared to be told to fuck off. He's not really prepared for Quentin to scramble around and climb up basically in his lap, but – okay. Eliot spreads his hands across Quentin's lower back, steadying him while Quentin kisses him with focus and purpose, chasing some kind of evidence or some kind of hope deep into Eliot's mouth with his tongue. Eliot just – lets him in through the cracks, like always. Lets him take what he needs.

Quentin drags his lips across Eliot's stubble, leaving Eliot's face damp and hot and aching like the last sense-memory of a faded bruise. He pulls back and says with a break in his voice, “How can that not mean anything to you, you _asshole_?”

As gently as he can, Eliot strokes his whole hand across Quentin's hair. “I didn't say that. I said that whether or not we sleep together doesn't affect how I feel about you.”

“I don't understand what you want,” Quentin says. “Are you trying to break up with me?”

“ _No_ ,” Eliot says. “I'm just – I want you to choose-- We don't get a lot of choices out here. I want you to choose what you want.”

Quentin puts his arms around Eliot's neck and leans down, his whole weight pressing against Eliot. “I don't want to lose you,” he says.

“You – literally kind of can't,” Eliot says. A little laugh makes Quentin's body shake in the circle of Eliot's arms. “I'm not going anywhere. And I love you. And you can – do whatever you want with that.”

“You're making it a little hard to be pissed at you,” Quentin says into the curve of Eliot's neck.

“Sorry,” Eliot says. “You want to fight about Nazis some more?”

“Maybe in the morning,” Quentin murmurs, nuzzling in for a more comfortable position against Eliot's shoulder.

It's not a very comfortable position for Eliot, holding Quentin in his lap like this, but he's not stupid enough to complain. He'll have to let go soon enough, and in the meantime.... Eliot can do hard things.


	6. Three Years (II)

Earth-style dating isn't really an option, and neither _Fillory and Further_ nor the how-not-to-fuck-up-Kingship cramming that Quentin did in the Whitespire libraries all that time ago really had much to say about – courtship? Is that what this is?

Quentin has never courted anyone before. He has dated people, but not, like – successfully. He lost his virginity to a girl he met at a meet-and-greet in his freshman dorm; they made slime together at an activities table and laughed about the weird silver dye on their hands, and she invited him to her room to watch _District 9_ , and they kept seeing each other for a few weeks, then stopped when they both started making other friends. He had a bona fide girlfriend for most of sophomore year, a reed-thin, overanxious pre-med student who was president of the Doctor Who Society and whose hands were always freezing cold; Quentin was in love with her, he thought, even though she was a little bit scary-intense about scheduling, and he knew that she got up in the middle of the night to go cry in the bathroom. He guesses that counts as dating, right? They went places, on dates. After they broke up, there wasn't anyone else, not seriously – one girl who worked the same shifts as Quentin at the peer writing center and was willing to hook up with him pretty regularly, when she wasn't seeing anyone else. A summer romance one year at Hilton Head; the second time Quentin convinced himself he was in love. One kind of random hookup with a slightly older woman he met at a MOMA exhibit, who he never saw again in person, but they did sext kind of a fair amount for the next few months until they realized their schedules were never going to match up and they might as well not bother. Alice. Eliot.

That's it. In raw numbers, Quentin guesses it's nothing to be ashamed of, but none of it adds up to something confidence-inspiring – like, Quentin definitely does not kid himself that he is a person who knows how to make things happen for himself, either sexually or romantically. Sometimes he's in the right place at the right time. Sometimes people think he's cute. He doesn't know; he never knows what the hell he's doing.

So in that sense, Arielle is no different.

She comes up every other day now, which is more than before, but not that much more. She still hangs out with Eliot, his designated sounding board for brewing and butchering, pickling and assembling tea blends and all the other foodie obsessions that keep Eliot from going full _Shining_ up here, fifty miles from anything that resembles a social life, but more and more, she spends her afternoons going on walks with Quentin. They go down to the ford to collect duck eggs for omelets and fish eggs for caviar, mushrooms and silverweed roots and a surprising amount of bark – who knew that bark was good for – things? Probably anyone from Fillory, but it's news to Quentin.

They hold hands on the way down, but they're usually carrying too much on the way back to make that practical. Quentin worries that-- Are they being too practical? There has to be a point where walking almost an hour up a hill to immediately be drafted into manual labor by some asshole who doesn't know what bark is for and his ex-boyfriend-- Like, at some point, that is not a date, right? Quentin doesn't know _what_ that is.

He also doesn't – exactly know what Eliot is. _Ex-boyfriend_ doesn't quite sit right in his head; even though they haven't slept together in weeks, they haven't exactly had a conversation about splitting up. Not that they had a conversation when they started, either, so Quentin doesn't know why he expected one about being over. If they are over.

They feel over. Quentin's still not sure what went wrong, or if this is just...what happens sometimes. Sure, in his experience it's what happens almost every time – people want to talk with you or hook up with you or go out with you for a while, and then they're kind of over it – but. But it's never happened to Quentin after _two years_ before. It's never happened – when it's Eliot.

Quentin guesses that Eliot's the fourth person he convinced himself he was in love with. Fifth if you count Julia, which Quentin doesn't like to, because he can get really down when he lets himself think about Julia.

When Quentin and Victoria broke up, they had six consecutive days of conversations about it, and she cried every time. He cried the first couple of days, too, and then after that he was equally sad, just also exhausted. When he left Hilton Head, he and Leah sat on the beach all night and talked about their feelings; only Quentin cried that time, but Leah was very nice about it. With Alice-- Yeah, well, they didn't have one specific, formal breakup conversation, but feelings were definitely expressed. Words were exchanged. Quentin thought that was just – how it was done. If the relationship had been more or less serious, you got an exit interview. He didn't know you could be ghosted by someone you'd been partners with for two years, so you know, add _that_ to the list of things he only knows now because of Eliot.

So he holds hand with Arielle, and he tries to find things to do with her that aren't only chores. He's teaching her how to juggle. He brushes and braids her hair while she tells him stories about growing up with five sisters and a brother, a lifestyle that's as alien to Quentin as magic ever was, possibly more so. They play a lot of battalion. He invents a silly little spell that animates flowers very temporarily and he makes them act like kittens, climbing onto her shoulder and thumping against her cheek for attention until she rifles her fingers through their petals; he's kind of proud of that one. They make each other laugh. They kiss sometimes, when the moment feels right.

Sometimes she goes home before it gets dark. Sometimes she stays for dinner, and the way she and Eliot talk to each other and sing together just like they've been doing for years – it's so surreal, and it makes Quentin feel even more like he doesn't know what the fuck is going on with his life, but it's not like it's awful. It's good, honestly. If he doesn't think too hard, it's just...being with friends. Quentin's only two friends.

When she stays overnight, Quentin kisses her in the doorway for a while, and then she goes to sleep inside the cabin, in his bed, and he sleeps next to Eliot. That part's weird. Lying with his back to Eliot, the full inch and a half that the width of the daybed allows between them at all times, which should be nothing but actually feels like an iron gate. As if Eliot's body, this body that Quentin knows better than he's ever known anyone's before, is shut up inside an invisible fortress.

They do move a little closer together over the course of the night, usually. Eliot's arm thrown over Quentin. Quentin's foot wedged between Eliot's calves. Eliot sleepily nuzzling Quentin's forehead before Eliot wakes up enough to remember that breakup that they apparently had entirely inside his head.

Quentin's so pissed off at him sometimes. He could've at least had the decency to make Quentin cry.

Of course, Quentin could theoretically have the decency not to rebound directly under Eliot's nose, with the best friend Eliot has. So maybe they're even.

There's a downed part of the fenceline that they haven't been able to fix because it's so overgrown with weeds and vines, binding the splintered wood into a morass of vegetation, so next time Arielle comes, she brings two goats on loan from her family's orchard. They're funny little things, no higher than Quentin's knees, high jumpers and voracious eaters. When Quentin gets down on his knees to show Ari which of the fenceposts are rotting at the base, one goat clambers onto his hunched back and bleats in frustration when it can't find purchase for its little hoof on Quentin's ear.

“Okay, hey, buddy?” Quentin says, batting its foot away. Arielle's no help; she can't stop laughing. “You wanna-- yes, you're very tall, kudos.”

Arielle flops down in the grass, laughing even harder. The other goat tries to stick its nose up her sleeve, and she rubs its neck fondly. “I don't think flattery is going to work,” she says, wiping her eye with her free hand.

“Well, you never-- Oh – they're not _talking_ goats, are they? Uh, are you?”

“Don't be so thick,” she says fondly. “Talking goats are much bigger. And they don't make social calls naked.”

Quentin makes himself awkwardly goat-free and points the thing at the vines. “Is – naked a thing?” he asks. “I mean, uh. There was a sloth at Whitespire, and she – wore hats sometimes, but that's about all. I thought it was just – a cultural difference.” Although in retrospect, Abigail was always a little pervy.

“Oh, well, _tropical_ animals,” Arielle says with faint contempt. Quentin's not sure – is that racist? Like, structurally racist, or just mildly prejudiced? Maybe that's something he should be concerned about, but he's not.

Mostly he just wants to lie in the grass, his hand tangled with Arielle's, occasionally swatting grasshoppers away from her hair, like a gentleman. “Can I tell you something I've never told anyone?” she says.

“Sure,” Quentin says. This is a new experience for him; he doesn't really have that thing that makes people want to open up, usually. “This sounds juicy.”

“I kissed a goat once,” she says.

And _that's_ new, too. “Um,” Quentin says. “A – talking goat?”

She punches him in the shoulder, not gently. “Quentin! _Of course_ he was a talking goat.”

“Right. I mean – right, obviously! Sorry, I just – that just came out, I know-- I knew that. Well. What – was it like?”

Her smile is small, but the relief in it is genuine. “Strange,” she says. “Of course, I was just a girl; all kissing was strange to me at the time. But he was a schoolmate of mine, and I liked him. I always liked him. I suppose I still like him, although we don't have a chance to talk often. He's married now, and very busy with his kids.”

“His kids, right,” Quentin says seriously. “He, uh, married another goat? I guess?”

“Who else could he have married? It's children who make a marriage.”

Quentin takes a beat to think about that. “Well, but – not always. I mean, what if-- Some people must get married and not be able to have children, or not want them.”

“Ah,” Arielle says. “Sometimes I forget that you've only lived among nobility. There are treaty marriages, of course, backed with binding magic.” Quentin nods; he's familiar. “But ordinary folk don't marry that way. We just take up with who we like, and we're not bound until there are little ones to care for.”

“Oh,” Quentin says. “Wait, so – the times Lunk asked you to marry him, he was asking...?”

“Why is that so strange to you?” she says with a puzzled tilt to her smile. “I know people must have babies where you come from.”

“It's been known to happen,” Quentin says. “Sure. So – you didn't want that?”

Arielle begins to tug on a lock of her hair. It's a nervous gesture. Quentin knows her well enough now to recognize her nervous gestures. “Not with him,” she says. “I do want it. Of course I do. But I knew he was too much of a child himself to be a father. I wish I hadn't wasted so much time hoping he'd grow. I'm twenty-five now, and the only one of my sisters still unwed.”

That's a lot of nieces and nephews, Quentin thinks inanely. Like it matters. “Hey, so,” Quentin says softly, because this is – not how he wanted to spend today, but it's kind of a priority for him to at some point _stop fucking things up_ with people he likes. “I don't want to... um, waste your time. If – time is something you're, you know, worried about? Or thinking about?”

“Are you telling me you don't want a family?” she asks.

He knows what he should say, but. But it's not exactly true, is it? So – maybe the truth. “I do,” he says. “I mean...I do _want_ that, but. You know about – about the quest and everything. We could be finished tomorrow, and then we'd. We'd have to leave.”

“ _We'd_ have to leave,” she repeats. “Only you and Eliot, you mean?”

Quentin has never – thought about – leaving with any more people than that. God, what would that even be like? Step back into their own time where no one's even had a chance to miss them – _hey Jules, hey ghost-Penny, hey Alice-who-kind-of-hates-me, meet my wife and kids, neat, huh?_ Like – what the actual fuck?

But then also...maybe? He's known Arielle longer than he's known any of his friends from home, except for Julia. By the time he gets home (it won't be tomorrow, probably), maybe he'll have known her a lot longer.

Maybe he'll be – a lot older than the ones he left behind. Maybe he'll be old enough that he won't even want to start living in reverse – won't want to go back to his twenties, the chaos and the drama and the uncertain future. Maybe by that point, what he'll really want is just to keep on being-- not Fillorian, maybe, but – but a husband and a father, a goddamn grown-up. Right now Quentin's only twenty-six and he feels a long way from all of that, but. Time flies. And when he's lying here looking at Arielle, her gray-gold eyes and her red-gold hair in the sunlight and the freckles across her nose that he can so perfectly imagine on a child's round face.... Quentin thinks he can feel the shape and the texture of what it would be like, to become that grown man.

“I don't know exactly how the time key is going to work,” Quentin says. “I've known people who went into the past and then back to their own time, but I don't know if.... I don't know if you can go into the future, if it's not your future.”

“All right,” Arielle says.

_All right._ “All right? Ari, how could I – if we had a child, how could I – go back and leave you?”

She shrugs a little, rustling the grass underneath her. “Oh, we'd make our way,” she says. “There's always a home for me in the orchard, and for any little ones I had. That's the point of family, you know; they'd make room.” He opens his mouth, he wants to argue. He can't just leave her to _make her way_ , couldn't possibly abandon-- “The future's never guaranteed to any of us, Q,” she says, moving her hand to cover his. “Women have made the best of worse circumstances, when they had to.”

This whole conversation is so _fucking surreal_. How is he even considering-- Why would she even _want_ him to? “It's more complicated than that,” he says.

“It's simple for me,” she says, smiling at him like he's backwards but adorable. “I've lived in this town all my life, and I certainly know what my options are here. I would, quite simply, rather have you for a little while, and then be able to see you in my child's face, than grow old with anyone else I've ever known.”

God, what – can he say to that? Who would be stupid enough to say no to that? “For me,” he manages with difficulty. “For me, it's – complicated.”

“Because of Eliot?” He's caught out without an answer to that. He doesn't want to say anything Eliot might not want him to say, but he can't lie to her, either. “Come on, I told you about the goat,” she says with a smirk.

Quentin laughs. “He'd love that comparison.”

“I asked him about you. I asked him if I would be – interfering, between the two of you.”

Unsurprisingly, this is the first time Quentin is hearing about this. “What did he say?”

Arielle wrinkles her nose in an expression of confusion that Quentin relates to very deeply. “He was oddly evasive.”

“That'd be El,” Quentin says. “So. The truth is.... Do you really want to know the truth?”

“I really do,” she says. “There's nothing about you that I don't want to know.” She makes it so easy to believe, too.

“So,” Quentin says, feeling his way slowly into this. He's never said any of this out loud before. There was never really a chance. “There's this – version of Eliot, and he's – artistic and thoughtful and gentle and vulnerable and passionate and romantic, and I'm – honestly so – so in love with him. With that Eliot. And for a long time I thought.... I mean, I knew he had all these defenses and whatever, but I thought...you know, that the longer we knew each other, the closer we'd get, and he'd trust me more with that part of him. But eventually I kind of figured out that the problem isn't lack of trust. The problem is that Eliot hates that person. And the more he likes you, it's kind of like, the more he – he wants to keep you away from seeing this stuff he's ashamed of about himself, that he thinks is – weak or effeminate or whatever his deal is. I don't know. I get it, but I don't.” Quentin falls silent for a moment, thinking back to – after Mike, after that horrifying and traumatic clusterfuck, and how Eliot.... How wrecking his body and wrecking his friendships were so much easier for him than just fucking opening his mouth and saying _something terrible happened and it's really hard, I don't know what to do_. If it hadn't been for Fillory, Quentin really thinks that – that Eliot would have died. Rather than just say – _this sucks, this hurts_. That's how much it's worth to Eliot, never to expose his own pain. So what do you _do_ with that? Quentin's never really figured it out. Probably he never will. “And I guess I just.... I know why he pushes me away, but I kind of just. I'm kind of sick of it. And if the version of Eliot that I fell for is just – never going to be an option, then... then I guess I'm looking at – other options.”

“That's sad,” she says gently. “It's rare to find someone who wants to know you, to know all of you. It's sad that he values his pride more.”

“High King in his blood. Comes with the territory, I guess,” Quentin says, and for once he's not pissed. How could Eliot be anything other than what he is? “I don't know what I'd do without him. But at some point....” Arielle nods like she understands. Maybe she really does; it's not like she doesn't know Eliot, too.

The goats do their job, and as a reward they're allowed to lie down by the fire and snack on slices of grilled peaches, which is the same reward that Quentin always gets when he's been good, so that's pretty nice treatment for goats, he'd think. One of them decides she's in love with Eliot and insists on sleeping with her long neck draped over his thigh; of course it's the girl goat, girls always love Eliot. The other one keeps trying to graze on Quentin's hair – how are they still _eating_ , where do they even put all this food?

As for the humans, they eat the sweet-hot bean stew that Eliot calls chili but definitely isn't chili, and they eat grilled peaches and drink sangria and Quentin pets one goat with each hand while Eliot and Arielle sing a lilting Fillorian song about sneaking in after being out in the meadow with your lover all night. They harmonize beautifully with each other. They always do.

Quentin is – happy, he thinks. Which is weird. It's weird for him, like, in general, but specifically it's weird because he still feels like his heart is stuck together with shoelaces and safety pins. Like if he gave himself any room to breathe, he'd find out that he was in pain.

It's hard. It's been two years, and of course it's hard to let go, especially when Quentin is not great at letting go under the best of circumstances. It hurts, it _hurts_ , and he loves Eliot, or some version thereof, but the stars are so beautiful and Arielle is so beautiful and so easy to talk with and this place, the yard and the torches and the Mosaic and the firepit and the daybed and the laundry line, is so known, so familiar to him now – the first place he's really lived as an adult, the first home that's been _his_ home.

How can he wish for so many things he can't have and still be so happy at the same time? Is this how normal people feel all the time, is this how they cope with – how the world is, and still keep moving forward with their lives?

He kisses Arielle good night, and it's – he doesn't know, it's – different from before. Better. He leans her back against the doorjamb and runs both his hands up into her hair, and he's almost disoriented, half of him still lying alongside her in the sunlit grass, the other half standing here under the stars. He's not drunk, he doesn't think. Arielle grips his arms and tilts her face up, her mouth opening under his, and she's so warm against him. Quentin thinks that's the best part – the warmth.

When she goes to bed, Quentin's not sure where to go. Eliot is sitting on the bench by the Mosaic, still flicking chunks of peach down to the goat at his feet. When Quentin sits down beside him, Eliot says perfectly calmly, “You're fucking it up.”

_With Ari or with you?_ Quentin almost asks, but he doesn't. Probably both, honestly. He laughs shortly and scrubs his hands over his face. “Yeah. So what else is new?”

“What's the problem?” Eliot says. “You like her, don't you?”

“Of course I like her,” Quentin says. “It wouldn't be so terrifying if I didn't like her.”

He can see half the curve of Eliot's smile in profile. “Huh, can't relate,” Eliot says.

Quentin watches the shadows dance as the torches flicker, adding another layer of color over top of the last failed Mosaic pattern. “ _You're_ fucking it up,” he finally says abruptly. Since they're doing this. Sort of doing this.

“Yeah,” Eliot says on a little sigh. “Yeah. I do that.”

“That's all you have to say?” Eliot glances over at him, and he looks honestly a little puzzled. Like he doesn't even know that people are _supposed to say something_ at times like this. “You don't want to – I don't know, tell me what you're thinking? How you – how you feel about...” _About me. About us. About everything we've been through, about what comes next?_ Just – anything?

Eliot sounds less polished than usual when he finally responds. He sounds tired, and maybe a little pissed off himself. “Q, I've told you how I feel a dozen times. You don't hear it, because it's not what you want to hear.”

_That's not fair_ , Quentin wants to say. But isn't it?

_I love you. But._ Eliot has said exactly that, hasn't he? And not just once, either. _I love you, but I'm not cut out for relationships. I love you, but you can do whatever you want. I love you, but like a brother. I love you, but sex is just sex to me, it doesn't mean anything. I love you, but I never meant this to last forever._

One way or another, Eliot has said it. Quentin didn't – listen. Didn't believe him. Didn't want to believe him.

“I have transition anxiety,” Quentin says. “This is just – really hard for me. Big changes like this.”

“I know,” Eliot says. “I'm trying to help, but I don't think I'm succeeding.”

Quentin closes his eyes. Everything still smells like – home. Woodsmoke and chalk and grass and peaches and Eliot. “I just...want you to know,” Quentin says, because he should say it. He spends so much time expecting Eliot to say – and he never really-- “I want you to know that it's been good. I mean, this quest has been hard, but – being with you made it better. And even if it wasn't everything – if it wasn't perfect or whatever.... A lot of the time it made me feel really good, when I could've felt really alone.”

When Eliot doesn't answer immediately, Quentin opens his eyes. Eliot is looking intently at the Mosaic. “I'm glad,” he says.

Quentin could be annoyed, but it's also – a little bit funny honestly, and also a little – he doesn't know. It's Eliot. Quentin leans over, letting his shoulder collide with Eliot's hard enough to jostle him. “Agree with me, bitch,” he orders.

Eliot laughs. “Okay, _bossy_ ,” he says. “Yes. I – agree with all of that.”

When Quentin stands up, he's surprised by Eliot's hand catching at his and holding on. He looks down at Eliot, who's just – so shockingly beautiful, with a halo of torchlight over his burnished hair and the laces loosened on his shirt, exposing the exact angles of his neck and collarbones that Quentin has kissed a hundred times. Eliot is so beautiful that it comes as a surprise every time, like Quentin keeps convincing himself that he's making it up, but he's not. He's so beautiful that it almost stops time when he lifts Quentin's hand and brushes his lips across the backs of Quentin's fingers. How did Quentin have this at all, ever, for any amount of time? It feels unreal already.

And then Eliot lets him go, and this time Quentin can feel it for sure. It feels over. They feel over.

Quentin knocks once on the cabin door, then pushes it open just enough to see inside. He sees Arielle shift so her back presses to the wall, making as much room as she can, turning the blanket back for him. Quentin sits on the edge and takes his shoes off, then lies down fully dressed. She puts her arm across his chest, her hair falling loosely over him as she presses up on her elbow to see him in the darkness.

“Can I just – have a minute?” he says, running a lock of her hair between his thumb and finger.

“Of course,” she says, settling into the narrow space in the crook of his arm. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Maybe not – right now, but. I really do want to talk to you.” And she wants to talk to him, and she wants to listen, and it just feels – so good, god it feels good. Like for once in his life, Quentin doesn't have to be afraid of saying too much.

He actually did mean it when he asked for a minute, but – she kisses him, and her hair smells amazing, like sunlight should smell, and when he reaches for her, his hand settles by accident or instinct in a cup around the outer curve of her breast, and he wants – _god_ , he wants--

She makes the sweetest noise when he presses his tongue up into her mouth, and she squirms against him as his fingers drag the thin material of her slip tighter against the warm skin underneath. “Quentin,” she murmurs, drawing back just far enough to shape the words. He can still feel her warm breath on his lips. “I know you're afraid that – that a family is something we might start and never be able to finish. And I'm sure of my choice, but if you're not, we can-- There are things we can do tonight, and things we can wait on until you are sure.”

“Your choice?” he repeats muzzily. He's trying to listen, but he's a little....

Her fingers stroke his cheek. “Thick-headed man,” she says with infinite fond indulgence. “You know well enough.”

“Maybe,” he says, smiling at her before tilting his head to kiss her thumb. “Tell me anyway.”

Arielle kisses him once, strong and searching and – god, warm, she's so _warm_. “I'll have all of you if you'll have me,” she says, the words tumbling out just a little too quickly, as if she's afraid he won't let her have her say, “and be glad for it all my life, whatever the consequences.”

“You say that now,” Quentin says, running his hand up the back of her leg where her shift is rucked up. “You're going to be so sick of that fucking Mosaic in a week.”

She drops her mouth to the crook of his neck, laughing and licking at the same time as pulls the shift further up her body, dragging his hands along after it until her whole body arches and she moans against his skin, and he's happy, it always makes him so happy when she sings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Hey, this story has been A Lot, hasn't it? I feel that way. Anyway, we're halfway there, and at the risk of Spoilers, I just want to kind of set your mind at ease: the next couple of chapters are set during the Arielle Years, and they kind of give Quentin and Eliot a chance to work on themselves and establish a little more intimacy and trust as friends, which I think they really need, as opposed to this level of entanglement, you know? And then their romantic relationship will pick up for the back third of the story, the adult version of their romantic relationship, and while there's still going to be some tension (it's still me, y'know?), I feel like that's the era of the story that will be a lot more Beauty of All Lifeish, more traditionally romantic. So that's -- I don't know if anyone needs that reassurance, but that's the general arc of where we're going from here, and I'm excited about it! Hope you are, too. Comments and kudos are a blessing, [spiders-Hth-is-an-outlier](https://spiders-hth-is-an-outlier.tumblr.com) is my Tumblr.


	7. Four Years

Eliot puts the last tile in place and stands up, lacing his fingers together and stretching his shoulders out behind his back. Nothing magical happens, not that it ever does.

The beauty of all life continues to elude the bold questers. And now, the weather.

When he turns around, he realizes that Ari is napping on his daybed, which is actually a semi-severe violation of the unspoken rules that govern everyone's territory around here, and Eliot would be pissed about it, except, well-- She's tired. She recently made a whole person, and Eliot's no expert, but he doesn't doubt that's tiring.

The whole person in question is also asleep on Eliot's bed, tucked securely into the space bracketed by his parents' bodies. Quentin isn't asleep; his hand keeps moving where it rests lightly over Ted, a dozy, aimless motion halfway between petting and kneading. He turns his head slightly in response to Eliot's movement, tracking Eliot with his eyes, but he doesn't say anything and Eliot doesn't either. Let them all sleep, if they can manage it. It's a perfect nappable warm afternoon and it's not like they're sleeping through the night – Eliot assumes. Babies don't for quite a while, right? Eliot can't say for sure; he doesn't have any younger siblings, and he keeps a silencing charm around his bed at night, which is like-- Okay, he knows, and he does like Ted, but it's not _his_ baby, and Eliot's eyes get really puffy if he doesn't get a decent seven hours in.

Eliot thinks he's actually a pretty good person. He helps out. He changes diapers and everything. But he likes his fucking sleep, okay? And barring emergencies, he thinks the two people who _haven't_ been sleeping alone for a year can take the night shift.

That sounded bitter. Eliot's not bitter. He's just – their friend, not their nanny, and he's good with boundaries. They've gotten through the past year as well as they have because Eliot is good with boundaries, and because normally Ari is, too.

He'll let her sleep in his bed _this once_ , but he expects an apology at supper tonight. Civilization depends on law and order, after all. Unspoken rules are not to be flouted.

Fine, so he's a little bitter. Yes, Eliot knows what he said, and he did _mean_ what he said, but he wasn't – immune to the fantasy that the response to _I want you to do whatever makes you happy_ would be – different from what it was. Even though if anyone should be immune to fantasy by now, it's High King Eliot the Uninvited. God, at least in this timeline there's no _armed resistance_ to Eliot's continued presence.

But it's fine, it's fine, he's – bitter, in a worldweary-but-sexy way, but he's manfully bearing up under the burden of heartbreak. Life doesn't stop needing to be lived just because there's drama, after all, and Eliot is doing what's necessary to keep life moving along at more or less a steady hum. He's refocusing his energies on the quest. He's bonding with the baby. He's worked out the spell that powers the rain shelter so that he can sleep outside even during inclement weather, and the first morning last winter when he woke up to mandalas of frost spiraling all over the intangible surface, refracting the morning light into star-like patterns across his bedding, he was genuinely, without even trying, happy to be where he was, warm and solitary and transfixed by the accidental beauty of it. He's recaptured that feeling over and over since then, his days like tiles that make up an undulating pattern of loss and peace and friendship and family and regret.

Eliot can imagine an alternate reality where he just lets the weight of it drag him under and turn him into the bitterest bitch in all of Fillory, but here in his reality, it's hard for him to keep up a good grudge when his heart insists on turning all – fond when he watches the three Coldwaters, all of them sleepy and sweet and cranky and frazzled as they explore their brand-new existence together as a family unit.

He's never seen Quentin so happy before. That's a thought that complicates everything.

Ugh, complicated thoughts are _Quentin's_ wheelhouse, not Eliot's. He needs a good distraction, and although part of him is tempted to fuck all the way down to the village and drink a bottle or three of wine before the tavern closes, he's willing to settle for an afternoon swim.

Just so he can tell himself the day hasn't been an entire waste, Eliot gathers up the sheets from Quentin and Ari's bed and a few other random pieces of clothing that need washing – everything except the diapers, really, which Eliot prefers to wash in buckets of pump water behind the outhouse, because he's technically aware that all manner of animals shit in his river already, but in order to preserve the joy of recreational swimming, Eliot has to have some mental barriers there.

And Eliot does love spending the hottest part of the afternoon down at the ford, in the shade and the cool water. There's something wildly decadent about wading naked into a mostly pure rushing Fillorian stream; even with laundry to accomplish, he feels like he's at an invigorating (and expensive) Scandinavian spa. It's good for his pores, too, he's convinced.

Unless it's stormed recently, the water isn't deep – that's why it's a ford, Eliot assumes – usually hitting Eliot between mid-thigh and waist where the bend in the riverbed allows the water to run wide and shallow and slow. So it's easy to do the little bit of scrubbing and wringing of the laundry standing up, and then he only has to relocate a turtle or two in order to spread things out on the rocks; the laundry won't get fully dry down here where the sun only filters in through the trees, but it won't be as heavy to carry back up and hang on the line.

While the laundry dries, Eliot floats. Sometimes he dips down to the rocky bed of the river, running his hands over the slippery stones, feeling shoals of little pale fish brush past his arms. He used to hate this sort of thing when he was a kid, mandatory hunting trips and church camp and Boy Scout survivalist bullshit, but – he doesn't know, the woods and the streams that he went into on Earth always felt foreign to him, an alien environment that was constantly rejecting him like a bad transplant while he silently longed for a decent cappuccino. This place is different. This is _Eliot's_ land – Eliot's river, where he knows exactly which rocks get the best drying sun and what time of year the turtles hatch. Where he's seen herons swoop down an arm's length away from him and skim off a mouthful of fish. Where he knows what time it is when he hears the first owl call, and how early in the spring the frogs start their mating songs. Where he's kissed Q on the sandy shore between the spreading tree roots. Where in a few years' time he might teach Q's son how to skip rocks and how to bait a fishhook.

It's different when it's not a forced exile into the wilderness. When it's home.

Eliot is considering moving up to the rocks to sun himself dry along with the laundry when Quentin comes picking his way carefully down the steep path to the ford, and that throws a whole new set of factors into the decision. Eliot doesn't want to seem overly precious about-- they all swim naked down here, it shouldn't be a thing, but also – boundaries. Eliot is good at boundaries. He stays down in the water, folding his legs up under him and settling his back against the boulder that juts out into the center of the ford, trying to look like he's mermaid-lounging.

“Hey,” Quentin says, actually accomplishing the _this-is-not-a-thing_ vibe Eliot is trying to put out. He sits down on the sandy shore, taking his shoes off and rolling up his pants to put his feet in the cool river. “I was hoping you were down here. I've been trying to talk to you about something, but there never seems to be a good time.”

“Yes,” Eliot says dryly. “Privacy can be hard to come by here.”

“Uh-huh,” Quentin says, apparently without a drop of fucking irony. “And, you know, the baby and everything.”

And everything. “Look, is this going to be a serious conversation?” Eliot says.

He knows the answer before Quentin says anything, just from the way Quentin stares at the surface of the water without looking up at Eliot. “Kind of,” he says. “I guess – a little serious, yeah.”

“I feel like I should put on pants, in that case,” Eliot says.

“Okay,” Quentin says, and then just – waits, it seems like. Eliot raises impatient eyebrows at him, and Quentin blurts out in surprise, “Am I – do you want me to – like, leave?”

“Closing your eyes would probably be sufficient,” Eliot says.

“Are you-- Seriously? El, I've, um – you know, seen – all that already.”

So fuck boundaries, he guesses. Fine. Eliot climbs up the rock and puts his pants on, and because he's still soaking wet, they obviously cling to him everywhere, but hey, it's a look. It must be working for him, too, because when he turns his attention back to the bank of the river, Quentin is scratching random patterns in the dirt and trying to look very much like a man focused on his art rather than a man desperately avoiding looking at his ex-lover's dick. Well, good. Fuck him for implying that Eliot's dick is _old news_.

Eliot situates himself as elegantly as possible, crosses his legs, and says, “All right, you wanted to talk?”

Quentin looks up, and if Eliot expected him to look shy or awkward – well. He meets Eliot's eyes squarely and says with that grim stubbornness that Quentin brings to the table when he's ready to fight, “It's a goddamn waste.” Eliot gives him another _say more about that_ with his eyebrows, and Quentin rakes a hand through his hair and then gestures in Eliot's direction with a slight, quirked smile. “You,” he says. “That – _you_.”

“Uh,” Eliot says. He genuinely can't remember the last time he's been so at a loss for words. He's not even sure that Quentin's saying – what it sounds like he's saying? “Thank you?”

“Is this how it's always going to be, El? You, just...alone?”

It's...sweet, Eliot guesses. Quentin sounds both baffled and frustrated by the concept, which is more of a compliment than if he were making an intentional effort to be complimentary. “I don't – know about _always_ ,” Eliot says carefully. “Sure, I'm – currently single, if that's what you mean, but I try not to think in terms of always. We could solve the puzzle tomorrow, right? And then everything would change.”

And then everything would change. Eliot kind of – tries not to think excessively about that, either.

Quentin takes a long breath, and the fight seems to have gone out of him already. He leans forward and watches his foot skim over the surface of the water. “I want to be your friend, too, Eliot,” he says.

“You...are,” Eliot says. Literally what--? Eliot doesn't know what to do with this conversation. He doesn't know what Quentin _wants_ from him. Not that he ever really did.

“I've been thinking....” Quentin gives up on the water and pulls his knees up, which is not a great sign. “You know how much of the winter we can't even clear off the ice enough to work on the Mosaic. And I thought – there's probably other work for a Magician, in Whitespire, in – in the city. It's not like we need a lot, but it would be nice if there was something to, you know, something to get Ted started in life, since we don't have land that's ours to leave him. And that would be – better for you, right? I mean – it's not home, but, but comparatively, you'd have – opportunities there, wintering there, that you wouldn't have if you stayed here.”

“Opportunities,” Eliot repeats. He's choosing to pass over the assumption that any money he earned in Whitespire would somehow automatically become Ted's inheritance. One thing at a time.

“I don't know,” Quentin mumbles, looking shifty, as if he absolutely _does_ know but isn't sure if he should say it. “Culturally – socially? I mean, when you had options, you were always – really social – all the, all the parties and everything. You always had things going on. And the days never change here, especially through the winter. And it's one thing when we're on a quest, but when we can't even-- You just seemed. Sad last winter. I thought – maybe kind of lonely?”

Eliot closes his eyes for one moment, willing himself to rein in-- Jesus, what would be worse here, if Quentin fucking well _knows_ why Eliot _seemed sad_ , or if he really has no idea? “What, only you're allowed to have moods?” Eliot says. He can't even tell himself he's trying to make it into a joke. He doesn't know what he's trying to make it. He doesn't know what _Quentin's_ trying to.... Jesus. Fuck.

“No, I was just thinking,” Quentin says. Thankfully, Eliot guesses, he doesn't sound like he's taken offense. “You're allowed to – you know. At least try to feel better. And I thought it might be easier if you had more distractions. I know things are complicated, but at least in Whitespire you'd have a chance to find – something. Someone. Who could possibly move on like this, you know? It's not fair to you.”

Okay, well. He does know, then. Eliot guesses that's probably better. “And coincidentally,” he says, “a little late honeymoon for you and Ari, right?”

“No, that's – El. I'm not trying to get rid of you.”

“Because you literally are,” Eliot says. “So that's confusing.”

Quentin growls in frustration and rubs his forehead against his kneecap for a second before he says, “I swear I'm saying this for you, not me. Fuck, El, I'll miss you so much if you go, but – but you're not happy, and I don't know how else I can-- That's all I want, you to be happy.”

“It's not like I don't appreciate the sentiment,” Eliot begins cautiously.

But Quentin has finally honed in on what the fuck he's trying to communicate, so he's going to spit it all out right here and now if the words choke him in the process. “What if this is, what if this is your last chance, you know? If we don't – solve this, if we never go back-- You might never get this time back again. And you are – young and you're beautiful and you have such a big heart, I know you have so much to give, to the right person, and I'm such a selfish piece of shit for thinking you'd even for a minute rather hang around here doing, doing my fucking laundry and raising my kids. You're worth more than that.”

Eliot no longer thinks that pants are a sufficient level of armoring for this conversation. Ideally he'd like one of those beekeeper suits, actually. “And you're not?” he says.

“It's...what I want,” Quentin says. “It's what I always wanted, but I don't think you can say the same thing. El, I'm not saying give up the quest. You'd come back in the spring. I mean – I mean, I hope you would. But we can't give up everything for – for what? For magic? We can't – it's not fair, it's too much. It's the kind of thing that – that heroes do in books, but that's not life, those aren't human beings, they're just stories. We're _human_. You're human. And you're my best friend, you're somebody I, I love so damn much, and every day I hate – thinking about how you were a King and you lost everything. This fucking quest took everything from you, and I'm – so happy, where the fuck do I get off being happy? It's not fair. It's not fair to you.”

“Okay, hey,” Eliot says. “Can you just – take a breath, please?” Quentin does, and it looks agonizing. “I hear what you're saying,” Eliot says carefully. “And I appreciate that you – care so much about this. It's not something I'm going to just decide on the spur of the moment, though, okay? I need time to think it over.”

Quentin puts his head down and nods, or else just scrubs his forehead on his knees. “Okay,” he says quietly. “Well, thanks – thanks for, um, hearing me out. I just wanted you to know that, like. You have options.”

“Noted,” Eliot says. “So are you going to help me carry this stuff back up the hill or what?”

Quentin does help, and he helps Eliot hang everything on the line while Ari, still blinking sleepily, nurses Ted on the bench. She chats with Eliot about what to have for dinner. Quentin settles in to draw the record of Eliot's last pattern. It's just a summer day, an ordinary day, with perfect Fillorian weather and Eliot's meaningful but undemanding work always waiting patiently for him and Eliot's dearest, most dependable friends never too far from his side.

It's almost paradise, in a way. He understands why Quentin is happy. If Eliot were a normal person, he thinks he'd be happy, too.

Sometimes he is, when he's under the stars, or under the webs of dawn frost, when the ducks and the frogs sing from the river, when the squashes flower, when his fingers manage the perfect tuts across the strings of the lute. Sometimes there's so much beauty here, and for once in his life, Eliot feels like it all _belongs_ to him. Like he's actually done something to earn it instead of just lying and scamming his way into the temporary use of it.

But only sometimes.

They all settle on something light for dinner, bread slathered with a sweet-hot mash of roasted peppers and honey and ground walnuts and spices that's a Fillorian staple, plus some falafel-like fried balls made of the beans they've been cooking out back all day, and of course some yogurt and strawberry jam. Arielle volunteers to be in charge of the meal, which Eliot thinks is very kind of her, until she drops her unburped infant child into Eliot's arms and says, “You don't mind, do you?”

“I don't know, do I?” he says, scrutinizing Ted's squishy, perpetually amazed little face.

Ari kisses Eliot's unshaven jaw and murmurs, “You know I can't thank you enough.”

“Oh, I know,” he says.

After he burps the baby, Eliot glances over at Quentin, but Eliot's already done his Mosaic duty for the day, so he supposes babysitting is his beat for the afternoon. He settles in the grass with his back against the daybed, propping Ted against his knees and giving over his fingers for Ted to squeeze in his little fists. Ted cocks his head, mesmerized by Eliot the way he's mesmerized by everything new, which is everything. “Yeah?” Eliot says softly in response to Ted's soft burble. “Is that so? You don't say.” Ted releases a sharp, giddy shriek and lets go of Eliot with one hand, which he uses to make random slapping motions that come nowhere near Eliot, limited as they are by the reach of Ted's tiny arm. “Terrifying,” Eliot says. “Monstrous. The Tyrant Prince of Fillory, that's what you are. Mmhm, that's you.”

Ted sighs and burbles again, relaxing so thoroughly that bubbles of drool appear at his lips. Eliot wipes them away with the edge of his sleeve, feeling – god, so tender and protective of this needy little thing, but without the gaping wound of terror that he held together with his bare hands every day between Fen announcing her pregnancy and the loss of it. It's helpful, he thinks, not being a father. Being just – an interested party. Maybe this is Eliot's lane.

Maybe there are things – normal things, normal experiences and emotions and – and relationships that Eliot just. Wasn't made for.

A lifetime ago, a thousand years ago, the very thought would've sent Eliot to his knees, tearfully praying for Jesus to come into his heart, to heal this broken piece of him that couldn't want goodness, couldn't obey or at the very least fake it as convincingly as his peers, couldn't be adequately human. He doesn't relate to that impulse at all anymore. It feels like something experienced by someone else entirely, someone Eliot only ever knew in passing.

Someone has to be a cautionary tale, right? _Don't jerk off, boys, don't look at porn on the internet, you'll be ruined for life, you'll always need more and more, you'll start to chase the harder stuff, you'll experiment with pain, men, drugs, with worse things, unspeakable things, you'll never be happy, you'll never be full, you'll always need more and more stimulation until you ruin your health and die young and alone in some filthy city, breaking your poor mother's heart._

Well, Eliot did his best to play the role he was handed, but somehow he's pushing thirty and still technically alive. Does that make him a failure as a libertine?

God, _of course_ Eliot's a failure as a libertine. He has the option in the palm of his hand of running away to the big city (such as it is), and here he is waffling around about _oh, the sound of the frogs in spring_ and _oh, but the baby smells so nice_. The ghost of Freddy Mercury must be so disappointed in him.

Freddy Mercury, of course, has not been born yet.

He tries singing The Show Must Go On, but he can't get the key right and Ted squirms restlessly as if he recognizes that fact until Eliot downshifts to something objectively more soothing. “ _And darling, I will be loving you until we're seventy_ ,” he sings softly, which has the improbable effect of causing Ted to babble more softly in response. “ _And my heart can still fall as hard at twenty-three. I'm thinking about how people fall in love in mysterious ways, maybe just the touch of a hand, and me, I fall in love with you every single day, and I just wanna tell you I am._ ” Ted coos once, as if trying to match the note, and Eliot breaks off with a dumb smile on his face. Ted smiles back at him, which is still a fairly new skill in his repertoire, new enough to remain just, like – fucking enchanting.

If Eliot leaves right before the first snows, Ted will be – what, right about eight months old? Eliot stretches for anything he's picked up accidentally about babies, and he thinks that's – crawling age? Getting closer to talking? If Ted's as whip fucking smart as his parents are, he'll probably talk early. Maybe when Eliot comes back, Ted will be saying _mama_ and _dada_ and _no_ , and – maybe Eliot will be a stranger to him, although – dogs wait for their people to come back from like war and whatnot, right? Ted will probably be at least as smart as a dog before long. Well, whatever, they'll get reacquainted.

If necessary. If Eliot goes.

When Eliot glances up, Quentin has paused in his scribbling and is staring intently across the Mosaic at the two of them. Eliot points imperiously in his general direction and says, “Back to work, Coldwater, nobody's talking to you.”

Quentin smiles briefly and tucks his hair back before hunching over his notes again.

It's an easy summer evening, just like any other. They eat by the fire, and Ari plays the lute while she reclines into Quentin's arms, and Ted sleeps like a hot stone on Eliot's chest while Eliot murmurs the names of stars to him for no special reason, just because he's heard it's good for babies to hear a lot of words.

Eliot closes his eyes. Is he happy? Has he been sad? What is this life that he's had a hand in building, where is this strange, muddy, soot-smudged kingdom that offers him no gold, no servants, no crown? He imagines what it would be like to be – elsewhere – to be anywhere – imagines the sounds of different music and laughter and the thud of dancing boots on the wooden floor, the burn of whiskey on the back of his tongue, the heavy grip of a hand on his waist, his breath sucked out of his lungs as rough fingers fumble at the buckle of his belt--

Who is he if he wants that? Who is he if he doesn't?

_You're young and you're beautiful_ , Quentin said, but Eliot isn't sure that he feels either of those things anymore. He hates how – far away from Quentin that thought makes him feel.

He hates how far away he feels from the person he was when Quentin loved him, and there's an unsolvable puzzle if ever there was one.

But he can't go on like this. He can't spend his life hating himself – not can't but _won't_ , won't come so far in life just to end up right back where he started. He has to do what he's always done: choose who he's going to be, and then go where that takes him.

Whoever and wherever that is. Eliot's still not sure.

After a while Ari reclaims her child and says goodnight to Quentin and Eliot with kisses for each. She never did mention the bed business, but that's all right, Eliot's over it by now. Quentin stays out a little longer, still keen to discus the economics of investing in a pair of goats, as if he actually doesn't yet know that Eliot will inevitably give in. Eliot should probably go ahead and put him out of his misery, but he's so cute when he's frustrated. “You were never such a cheapskate at home,” Quentin finally grumbles.

_At home_ means Earth – still. Mostly. Eliot wonders how long that will be the case, but instead of that he says, “Because you only knew me when I had other people's money to spend.” Quentin grunts his acknowledgement of that, then starts to get up to his feet like he's headed for bed. “Wait,” Eliot says, the very moment the word flashes through his head. Quentin looks down at him curiously. “Let's – talk some more. About earlier.”

“Okay,” Quentin says. He offers Eliot a hand up, and then instead of letting go he transfers his grip to Eliot's sleeve, tugging him over to the bench.

Quentin's correct, it is more comfortable once they're seated there and Eliot can stretch his legs; the swim helped, but other than that he's been down on the ground practically all day, and his joints have begun to decide that terms and conditions apply on their ability to do that. _Young and beautiful_ , he laughs to himself. Sure, why not.

Quentin sits closer to him than absolutely necessary, but not directly up against him. “How are you, Eliot?” he asks in the – warm way that he hasn't as much, lately. He's probably been too afraid Eliot would actually answer.

“I don't know,” Eliot says. “All over the map, I suppose.” Quentin nods and just keeps waiting. “Did I ever tell you that I failed my Brakebills entrance exam?” Eliot finally says.

“No,” Quentin says with a startled laugh. “No, you-- Really?” Eliot hums his answer: _really_. “But you're one of the strongest Magicians in your year – you were, I mean,” Quentin says.

“Not always a matter of talent, is it?” Eliot says, and Quentin concedes the point with a little shrug. “When they scooped me up I was – hung over. High as a kite. I was so out of it I didn't even realize how weird the whole experience was until I was halfway through the test, and then the more I tried to pull it together, the further down the rabbit hole I fell. It was-- huh. A mess. I was a mess.”

Quentin processes this quietly for a moment. “So how'd you get in?”

“At the time I thought – Fogg took pity on me, which is probably at least partially the truth. When I met with him in his office, he said, _From one fall-down drunk to another, now is the time for you to decide which you are first, a Magician or an alcoholic_.” Quentin snorts at Eliot's gruff Fogg impression, or maybe just at the general memory of Dean Fogg. “But knowing what I know now, I think obviously there were – more factors in play than I realized. Your Chatwin girl was there.”

“Jane?” Quentin says.

“Eliza. Whoever.”

Quentin frowns thoughfully and nods. “She made sure you got training. She knew Fillory needed you. I wonder why she didn't-- Well, but if you were the only one of us who had the blood of the High King, then I guess that – that got us closer than whatever Julia was doing, in the other timelines.”

“I guess it must've been something like that,” Eliot says. “Anyway. At the time, I focused on the Fogg thing. And – I decided I wanted to be a Magician first, and only a part-time alcoholic.”

“I'm glad,” Quentin says. “Without you – Eliot, without you--”

“Okay,” Eliot says, tempering his shortness with a little smile. He gets the picture, though, they don't need to go through it. “The point of this anecdote actually is... I don't make good decisions. When I'm on my own, when I'm – when I'm trying to be happy. I don't think I really...understand what that means. When I left home, all I cared about was finally getting a chance to – be happy, to – feel things and have things that felt good, because everything had felt so bad for almost as long as – as I could remember. And if it hadn't been for Fogg and Brakebills and – if I hadn't been afraid that if I fucked up they'd send me back to the real world, I don't know if I-- I don't know where that would've ended. But I can guess.”

“You were a lot younger then,” Quentin says. “I mean, people, people's brains don't even really – you were, what, twenty-one, twenty-two? You were pretty much a kid. And you made bad choices, but who doesn't make bad choices? Julia dated, like, the _worst_ guys when she was new to the adulthood thing. I wrote suicide notes as a hobby. Kids are idiots.”

Fair enough. Eliot's not always as special as he likes to imagine he is. “I think I'm just – trying to say that I'm scared,” Eliot says. “To be alone. I feel like I've always done better within a certain amount of structure, of – of expectations. I started out just trying to be happy, and I needed Brakebills to save me. When I – when I hurt worse than I ever had, and all I cared about was doing whatever it took to feel good again – I ended up needing Fillory to save me. I think I just don't trust myself to...know what being happy is supposed to feel like. To know how to get there. There's a fine line between – having an addictive personality and being an addict, and a big part of the difference is. It's just access, and it's control. I already know I don't have much in the way of self-control, so a more – controlled environment.... It helps. Having something to lose helps.”

In the flickering light of the torches, Quentin reaches for him and it looks for a moment like it always looked, like Quentin's fingers are going to hook into the collar of Eliot's shirt, tangle in the laces and tug him into.... But instead Quentin just covers Eliot's forearm gently with his hand and says, “I want to make sure I understand. Are you telling me that if you leave here you're worried that you'll drink too much?”

“Yes,” Eliot says, and he could leave it at that, really. That would be enough – easy to understand, easy to take seriously. But instead he says, “The drinking and – the rest of it, I use, I use whatever's there when I want to-- That's the thing, Q, I'm not going to meet anyone the way you met someone. I functioned better than I ever had in my life when I was married, and I wasn't _happy_ , but I wasn't such a – _fucking disaster_. I don't know if my version of happy is ever going to be – good for me?” _Ruin your health, drugs and disease, alone and abandoned by your degenerate friends, your poor mother's heart.... Boys like me shed blood for aspiring... Boys like me die from it._

If he doesn't believe any of those voices anymore, why won't they _shut up_?

“Hey, come here,” Quentin says, and it's probably complicated and problematic and overall not the best idea, but Eliot doesn't have it in him to fight being pulled into Quentin's embrace. “I know you're wrong,” Quentin murmurs into his hair, both arms wrapped around Eliot's shoulders while he sags helplessly further and further into Quentin's space. “Yeah, you've made bad choices before, but I don't believe for one second that – that there's not a version of happy that's going to work for you. There is. I don't know if it's here or it's at home or it's somewhere else, I can't tell you that, but I know it's real.”

“Not everybody gets that,” Eliot says.

“You will,” Quentin says, and it almost drags a laugh out of Eliot. He knows that stubborn tone so well. Quentin pulls away so they can look each other in the eyes. He cups his hands gently around Eliot's face, and Eliot hates and loves the way he feels so _held_. He's missed this, he's missed the intimacy of Quentin's skin as much as-- honestly, so much more than he's missed the orgasms. “I think you're this scared because you want to do it,” Quentin says. “Right?”

Eliot can't keep up the eye contact, can only let his eyes flutter closed. “I don't know,” he says. “I guess.”

God, he's lonely. He _is_. These people are his friends, his family, but he still wants....

When he goes home – home-home, back home, Earth-home – Eliot knows all too well that he'll have to give up the love-sex-romance trifecta forever; he'll have to honor the oath he took on behalf of a world he didn't expect to love as much as he does. He thought he was getting away with something, being here, being Quentin's for a little while, outside of time. And now he's just – _here_ , in suspended animation, without even Fen's cloyingly earnest affection, without the cooling, fire-opal blaze of Margo's lavish kindness, heartsick for the same man who's always been Eliot's impossible dream, always been so unbearably above Eliot's station in life. Eliot's just _here_ , and he can't ever get away from it all, unless he wants to give up his – his home. The only home that's ever been Eliot's.

It's not fair. It's not _fucking_ fair.

“I hate this,” Quentin says, low and intense. “I want to – fight a dragon or something. I want to _do_ something. I hate seeing you hurt like this.”

Now's a hell of a time to decide that.

No, that's – bitter. Eliot doesn't want to cross that line, doesn't want to give in to that temptation to self-pity. He doesn't know how long it'll take him to crawl back out again.

“It's not your fault,” Eliot says. He pulls away from Quentin's touch and tries to wipe under his eyes while looking like he's just fixing his hair. “Life's not fair. And I appreciate what you're trying to do, but this is just – how it is, and giving me a couple of months off to slut around in Whitespire before I lose my looks is not fundamentally going to change anything.” Quentin is all set to object to some part of that or all of it, but Eliot doesn't let him. “If it were easy, they wouldn't call it a quest, would they?”

“You're so full of shit,” Quentin says like he's torn between admiration and anger. “We're actually talking for the first time in forever, so can you just not – be like that?”

“What, sincere?” Eliot says. “I mean every word I'm saying, darling.”

“Well, then you're an idiot,” Quentin says bullishly. “Because you are never, ever, ever going to lose your looks.”

Okay, Eliot admits. That one surprised him. “You brat,” he grumbles while Quentin keeps trying and failing to fight the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Fine, it _is_ your fault. Happy?”

“I mean – kind of,” Quentin says softly, reaching out again to squeeze Eliot's unresisting hand. “It's not like you've been hiding it as well as you think you have, so we might as well just have it out there. I know you – think I made the wrong choice.”

Eliot breathes in deeply, and then out, nice and slow. “No,” he says, and – he means it. He does. In spite of everything, he does. “I think you got what you always wanted, and I want that for you.”

“I want that for _you_ ,” Quentin says.

“I know,” Eliot says, leaning in to press a soft kiss to Quentin's forehead. “I know, darling. Would you settle for us just – trying to be friends like we used to be again?” Because they are friends, but – it's not like it used to be. Neither of them have ever admitted it, but that doesn't mean they don't both know.

“I don't think it works that way,” Quentin says carefully. “I don't think you – get to go backwards like that. But I really, really want to try harder to be – whatever kind of friends we're going to be next, you know?”

Fair point, Eliot supposes. Time is an illusion, but also it very much isn't. “Yes,” Eliot says. “Let's try that.”


	8. Eight Years

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kind of hate spoilers personally, but there's a little content warning for this chapter that I'm putting in the endnotes. Times are tough, and maybe you're not feeling any surprises today. I get it.

“Dad! Dad!” Quentin hears in his sleep, and he's rolling his tongue around, trying to produce enough saliva to answer, when an escalating “Daaaaaad!” coincides with his son's forehead colliding at force with Quentin's nose.

So they're both awake now.

Quentin groans and sits up, trying to bundle his squirming, giggling child into the blanket. “Hold still,” he orders. “Hold still, I'm going to tie you to the donkey.”

“No no no,” Ted laughs breathlessly, sticking his arm up out of the blanket's folds. “Don't tie me to the donkey!”

“Nope, too late, I'm doing it,” Quentin says, and now he's kind of interested to see if he _can_ get the corners of the blanket tied together.

He can't, and it's just as well. They both slump to the bed together, Quentin winded from the effort and Ted winded from laughter. Ted snuggles into Quentin's side, resting his little cheek on Quentin's chest while Quentin strokes his hair. “Eliot says the Uber's here,” Ted finally remembers to say. “What's an Uber?”

“Your Uncle Eliot's idea of a joke,” Quentin says.

“It's funny,” Ted says loyally. Ted thinks everything Eliot says and does is the absolute height of comedy, which – well, it stands to reason, honestly. Eliot's got that plus-three charisma bonus versus Coldwaters, he probably can't even help it.

Suddenly a critical mass of Quentin's brain wakes up to the content of the message being delivered and he says, “Wait, is everyone ready to leave except for me?” Ted nods and curls his fingers in Quentin's nightshirt, tugging with all his little might. “Okay, okay,” Quentin says. “Just let me wash up first, okay, buddy? I'll be ready in – five minutes, I promise.”

Ted looks very put-upon, which Quentin can't really fault him for. It's not Ted's first trip down to the village, but he was so small the last time they took him, small enough for the three adults to trade him back and forth, carrying him all the way down and all the way back without much effort at all. If Ted has any memory of those trips at all, it's all a muddle, so for all intents and purposes this is his first time. Quentin would be pretty excited, too, in his place.

In his own place, Quentin is – he doesn't know, a little excited? He hasn't been down in over a year himself, and while he isn't just dying to visit a small army of in-laws, and he'd just as soon skip the shopping parts of the trip, too, he's – still inexplicably excited.

It's been a really good year. Quentin remembers when he measured good moods in hours and days, so months and years is – something else. Something to celebrate.

He hums while he cleans up out back, the chorus of a song he used to know, now reduced to bare fragments of lyrics in no particular order, slightly longer strings of melody. Eliot teases Quentin all the time about his terrible memory for Earth music, but Quentin thinks he's the normal one here; only Eliot Waugh can just inately reel off the entire Billboard Hot 100 of 2015. He has to be cheating somehow – like a Pandora spell of some kind, Waugh's Wondrous Playlist.

It's weird to think that if he hadn't come here with Eliot, he'd barely remember any Earth music at all, other than Happy Birthday and Jenny's phone number and what a Rickroll sounds like.

It's weird to imagine any version of this life that doesn't have Eliot in it, but honestly, why would he want to?

When Quentin's dressed for the day, he comes around to the front of the house where Arielle, god love her, has his tea waiting for him. He gives her a kiss and his hand goes unintentionally, almost superstitiously to touch her belly. “Did she let you get any sleep at all last night?” he asks Arielle.

Arielle shrugs. “Don't be too hard on her,” she tells Quentin, as if Quentin had any power or desire to do that. “I know from experience that she'll have to be a kicker, if she's going to keep a big brother in line.”

“Oh, I see whose side you're going to be on,” Quentin chuckles, and takes a quick sip of his warm, sweet tea before he kisses his warm, sweet wife. “Are they arguing?” Quentin asks, nodding across the yard in the direction of Eliot and their hired donkey. Nobody's raised his voice yet, but Eliot's face has taken on that distinctly throne-room quality that Quentin still associates with the moment before Margo says something unreasonable – the Negotiations Are Breaking Down Before Our Very Eyes look.

Arielle shrugs again. “He wants to raise the passenger fee because of the baby. Normal part of the haggling process, I'm sure Eliot can handle it.”

Quentin is less sure, because Eliot can be pretty unreasonable where money is concerned – in both directions, really, splashing out at the most unexpected times and then refusing to spend one bent coin when Quentin thinks it would really just be a lot easier to pay. “Why is he wearing pants?” Quentin says.

“Sweetheart, don't be rude,” Arielle sighs.

“No, I mean-- How does he put them on?”

“ _Sweetheart_.”

“Okay, sorry. Sorry.”

But seriously, how?

Eventually Eliot stalks over to them, visibly dissatisfied. “Sorry, this is my fault,” Eliot says gruffly. “I didn't realize he'd be such a bitch about the last time I beat him at cards. He thinks I cheated him.”

“Did you?” Quentin asks.

Eliot presses a hand over his own heart, but he doesn't have time to answer before the donkey turns his head and yells back at them, “You know you deal from the bottom of the deck, Eliot Waugh!”

“You were the one dealing!” Eliot shouts in return.

“How does that-- how did he--?” Quentin clocks the look his wife is giving him, and he sighs. Not important, he guesses.

Given the rocky start they've had on this trip, Quentin makes a point to be extra polite to their hired help, whose name is Applebear. Or at least he tries; it's surprisingly difficult to figure out what counts as making polite conversation with the beast of burden who may or may not have been hustled into taking this job by a Magician with an excellent poker face. “Is that an unusual name?” Quentin asks. “For, um – I guess I'd think it would be more common for – bears?”

“I think it would be a little on-the-nose for a bear, don't you?” Applebear says, and that's the last polite conversation Quentin attempts to make. He'll just have to tip instead.

Loaded with Arielle and Ted, Applebear walks at about the same speed Eliot and Quentin do, but the two of them lag a little behind to decrease the social awkwardness. “Seriously, did you cheat?” Quentin asks under his breath.

Eliot glances over at him and smiles silkily. “Perish the thought.”

Quentin disapproves, of course, but he kind of can't help grinning back. “Where'd you pick up that habit, Whitespire?”

“You told me to earn some money,” Eliot says with a shrug.

“We might not have the same definition of _earn_ ,” Quentin says. “Are you – are you going back this winter, you think?”

“Mm,” Eliot says. “We'll see.” Quentin tries not to look too pleased, but – that's what Eliot said last year before he didn't go, and the year before that when he also had some kind of excuse. If this makes three years in a row that Eliot winters up here with them, then – that kind of seems like Eliot just lives here full-time again. That's a relief, because the last time Eliot left, Ted was really too young to ask any questions, so Quentin's never had to explain it. He wasn't looking forward to that.

Also, he – just wasn't looking forward to Eliot being gone at all, for selfish reasons. They did all right, of course, the two winters that he and Arielle and Ted were up here alone, but it always felt – off-kilter. The food tasted different, and all the harmonies were gone when Arielle sang, and nobody could wear out Ted with roughhousing the same way, and nobody caught Quentin's references, and it was just-- Everything was fine, but also, nothing worked.

Quentin has zero right to ask him not to go, but he's so bone-deep relieved that Eliot doesn't seem to want to.

Walking down a pretty steep hill while low-key being a moony disaster over his best friend – Quentin's not often symptomatic anymore, but come on, Eliot's still and forever the most _Eliot_ person in the whole world, so it's probably a lifelong condition – causes Quentin to stumble a little over invisible unevenness. Eliot's hand flashes out immediately, catching Quentin around the arm. “Eyes on the road,” Eliot tells him mildly, but he doesn't give any particular sign that he realizes where Quentin's focus actually was, thankfully.

There are certain things they do for each other, that no one ever had to ask for, that they just _do_. Quentin doesn't flirt, even though Eliot flirting back is the best feeling in the world, because he knows that he can't ever, _would_ never follow through in the way that Eliot would like him to. Eliot doesn't, barring immediate physical danger, touch Quentin very often, because he knows-- Well, whatever he knows. However he perceives the way things stand between them now. Sometimes it's hard for Quentin to wrap his head around how Eliot sees the world, all that thorny pride and unshakeable loyalty and secret tenderness and slow-boiling, alcohol-soaked self-loathing creating lenses over lenses, distorting the reality that – that Quentin perceives, that Quentin prefers to think of as reality.

It's complicated. They're complicated.

“Sorry,” Quentin says. “Lost in thought. You know me.”

Eliot smiles at him briefly. “Any revelations?”

“It's weird that we had the same magical education, but I'm definitely a wizard and you're a sorcerer,” Quentin says. “Like, D&D-wise.” It wasn't actually what he was just thinking, but he had the thought a day or two ago and hasn't gotten around to sharing it yet. For obvious reasons.

“Your _face_ is weird,” Eliot says, which is probably the most rational response possible to that.

It's good, it's a good day.

Once they get into town, they tackle the shopping part of the trip first. There's a dry goods store where Eliot adjusts their standing orders from month to month, and one shelf of the place has an odd assortment of kid-friendly things, toys and curios and occasionally a storybook or two. This time there's a wooden forest scene constructed inside a bottle, with trees that sway slightly and a cheerful rabbit who bobs his head and claps when you pull on little strings. Ted is vaguely interested in it, but he doesn't quite get what's special about it until Quentin crouches down beside him and prompts him softly with _look at how big it is_ and _look how the neck is so small, how do you think it got in there?_

“Is it magic?” Ted asks, eyes wide as he touches the bottle in Quentin's hands.

“Maybe,” Quentin says. “But you can make these without magic, too. My father wasn't a Magician, and he used to make ships in bottles from a kit you could buy in a store like this.”

So while Eliot haggles over the price of raisins and Arielle gets fussed over by baby-fevered women that Quentin doesn't know, Quentin sits on the floor and tells his son about ships and the sea and model airplane kits and how patient, how endlessly patient Quentin's father was in every respect, whether he was lining up numbers beneath numbers or manipulating long tweezers to pry up tightly folded rigging through the neck of a bottle. “Was he patient even when he was a little kid?” Ted asks.

“I didn't know him then,” Quentin says, smiling a little at a four-year-old's imperfect grasp of time. “Probably not quite as much; most little kids aren't. It's the kind of thing you practice.”

Or not. Quentin doesn't think he's ever made it a priority to cultivate patience. Maybe he associated it too much with his stodgy, slow-moving, unimaginative father who only read detective novels and only created things that came out of kits. God, what an ungrateful shit Quentin was, how obsessed with his own inner landscape, with the perceived uniqueness of his yearnings and his fears. He wishes more than anything that he hadn't wasted so many years that he could've been learning the things his father knew, learning to be the kind of steady, patient rock of safety and acceptance that his father was.

Quentin wants to be all of those things. For the first time in his life, he wants that so much more than he wants to be special, and it galls him that he's having to build it all up from scratch now, when maybe he could've started out with – like a kit or something. With all the things Ted Coldwater knew and was and could've taught his son.

They don't buy the bottle – it's really too fragile a thing to keep around a four-year-old, and Ted seems to accept that logic, or at least be willing to be rerouted onto a different present. He picks out a colorfully painted top that's slightly challenging to operate, involving wrapping a string around a handle and releasing it just right, so Quentin figures he won't get bored with it right away. And even if he does, he'll repurpose it somehow; like a cat, Ted doesn't really recognize the distinction between proper toys and things like boxes and sticks and whatever, happily drafting it all into whatever weird four-year-old world of make-believe people who don't watch cartoons invent.

Ari buys a windmill sort of thing with folded blades, which she explains is to cut choppily through the air and transmit vibrations into the ground that discourage moles; moles have been the bane of their existence ever since they've been trying to expand the garden, and Quentin figures the stage after this is his wife decapitating moles with a butcher knife, so he's really hopeful that this works. Quentin buys some muscle balm and a new shaving brush. Eliot buys new socks and eyeliner. It's the kind of thing they would've impulse-bought at CVS back home and never thought about, but it feels like luxury now.

It's crazy how many things have started to make Quentin feel unfathomably lucky, since Ted was born. The smallest things – the longevity of his one hairband, the adorbleness of ducklings, catnaps in the rocking chair, the patch of freckles on the front of Arielle's shoulder that he loves to kiss, making snow angels, sneaking Office quotes into conversation to get that twinkly look of recognition from Eliot and Eliot alone, the feel of the first cut of a straight razor through the shaving cream – nothing little things, ordinary things, can sometimes stop his heart with how incredible they are for a minute. How beautiful it is that he's alive to experience this.

That was never a given, after all. Quentin's done a lot of dangerous things. There were times in his life when just existing felt dangerous, when he didn't trust himself not to be the source of his own undoing.

And yeah, he has his moods now. He guesses he always will. But who doesn't have moods? Even Quentin's father did, if you knew what signs to look for. The difference now is that it's been years since Quentin thought _nothing means anything_ or _I'll never belong anywhere_.

Everything means everything. He just hopes that when – if and when he goes home, he'll hang onto this feeling. The certainty of belonging where he is, and of being whose he is. That can be as real on Earth as it is in Fillory, can't it? God, he hopes so.

Socks and so forth can be had at the dry goods store, but there's a different store where the tailor works, and they're headed there next in spite of Arielle's protests, to buy red cloth for a red dress. “I don't need it,” she says for the millionth time. “You've made your point, I appreciate the point--”

“Well, then we agree,” Quentin says. “Red dress it is.”

It's a well-trod argument, at least a year old – well, not really an argument, not deep down. Just one of those nights they were lying awake, telling half-remembered childhood stories in each other's arms, and Arielle said that her sisters, all brunettes, always wore red dresses for the harvest festival, but that Ari herself was never allowed because her mother thought it didn't suit red hair – a tiny splinter of non-trauma, the kind of pain that a sheltered and doted-on little kid thinks of as a brutal injustice and shame, the kind a grown woman laughs at in retrospect. But – _that_ kind of laugh, you know? Like she knew it was stupid, but the splinter was still there. Ever since, Quentin's been swearing that he'll see her in red, and ever since, she's said it's a silly expense to no purpose, a child's indulgence unbecoming a wife and mother.

Nothing about that argument has made Quentin any more inclined to give in.

He's compromised by agreeing to buy the cloth and trimmings and let Arielle make it herself, instead of splashing out on the tailor's salary. She needs a project anyway, coming into the seventh month of her pregnancy and slowing down on the ordinary life tasks a little. She'll be very, very pregnant in the hottest part of summer, and hopefully she can sit in the shade and sew for at least part of it.

The tailor isn't in his shop – Quentin gathers from what his apprentice does and very delicately doesn't say that the old man is semi-retired, at least from dealing with customers. That's fine; Quentin and Ted practice with his new top while Arielle and Eliot and whatshisface the assistant conduct high-level meetings on the price, shade, durability, and whatever else of the red fabric options. Everyone knows better than to consult Quentin, which is fine by him.

Even after Arielle settles on the one she wants, Eliot and the apprentice remain in deep discussion on – professional whatever – and once Quentin starts noticing, it's.... Well, to be fair he seems more like an assistant than an apprentice, not actually much younger than all of them, and even with the counter in between them, he seems really – intense about getting Eliot's agreement to whatever he's saying, and actually Eliot is half-leaning against the counter, leg bent and shoulders forward like he's (unusually for Eliot) trying to make himself a little shorter, trying to come down closer.

Buldark, Quentin remembers his name is, because it sounds like that BBC show Poldark. He's definitely on the short side, shorter than Quentin, and slightly built with auburn hair tied back and deep blue eyes and some scarring on the right side of his face like from a fire, but it's kind of, whatever, the charming kind of scar, not disfiguring or anything. He's not disfigured at all, he's fine, he's – cute. He's _really, really interested_ in whatever Eliot has to say about red dresses. Or whatever.

“Dad, look Dad, did you see?” Ted says as the top wobbles briefly, and briefly looks like it's really going to go somewhere.

“Uh-huh,” Quentin says, returning his attention guiltily to Ted and the toy. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Eliot lean in to emphasize a point, and Eliot's hand graze over Buldark's forearm, the pale moonstone in his silver ring set off brightly against Buldark's black sleeve. “That was so close,” Quentin forces out through a very tight-feeling throat. “Show me one more time how you did it, okay, bud?”

It's fine, it's fine. It's not fine, but it is what it is.

It's complicated.

When they're finally done having the fabric cut, they have lunch at the tavern. It's not exactly packed to the gills at this hour, but the staff knows Arielle, of course, and are delighted to ply her son with cake and compliments, and Eliot with hard liquor, so guess they recognize him, too. They're serving hash today, which has more bacon in it than the kind Eliot makes at home, but honestly it's not really better; Eliot gets a better crust on the potatoes, and these mushrooms are a little more bland than the kind they gather on their land. But whatever, it's okay.

To Quentin's surprise, Eliot pays the tavern lady for a room for himself. That wasn't really – discussed. “You're not staying with us at the orchard?” Quentin asks once she's gone, because he'd rather not fight in front of the tavern lady, but maybe he does want to fight about this? He hasn't decided yet.

“I don't want to crash your family thing,” Eliot says lightly. “Ari's parents don't care about seeing me.”

“Oof,” Ari says, leaning on the bench to bump her shoulder against Eliot's arm. “Who cares what they care about? Come with us, it'll be funny to see all the widowed aunts flirt with you.”

Eliot grins down at her. “Tempting,” he admits.

“Just come for dinner, if you have to be thick about it,” Arielle says in the tone that means this invitation is an order. “Come back here and drink yourself split-headed afterwards if nothing else will make you happy.”

“You know me so well,” Eliot says coolly, but it's not true. _Quentin_ knows him, but Quentin doesn't say anything. What's there to say? It's nobody's business but Eliot's.

Quentin doesn't fight with him about it, obviously. Eliot comes into town all the time by himself, but he never stays the night; it never occurred to Quentin that he might want to, but. He might want to, sure. That makes sense. So there's no reason he shouldn't have one night to be – alone. Or whatever. It's just money, and – and Eliot deserves to be happy.

God, Quentin's the worst person in the world for even.... _Of course_ Eliot deserves to be happy.

That part's not complicated at all.

They throw a huge party with Quentin and his family as guests of honor down at the orchard, but with the size of Arielle's family, it's almost accidental – word gets around that something interesting is going on, and people show up in droves.

Quentin finds it all overwhelming, but not really the worst. Ari's father – a soft-spoken but surprisingly blunt gentleman who's a little round but still bursting with energy, bald and a little cagey when it comes to business affairs – particularly likes Quentin because he doesn't have to find work for Quentin, unlike his other small army of useful-to-varying-degrees sons-in-law. Arielle's mother is – a lot like Ari, really, slight but fearsome, and she was totally indifferent to Quentin until Ted was born. Ted's her twelfth grandchild, but her enthusiasm for grandmothering is undimmed. Quentin finds her lovely and tries to stay out of her way.

Everyone else is Arielle's sibling or a sibling-in-law or some flavor of cousin, and Quentin just greets them all like he can tell any of them apart and tries to stay out from underfoot. He's probably not setting a great example for his own son about the importance of family, but like – he just has no frame of reference for any of this, so he's just trying to stay above water.

He's better with the kids, so that's where he kind of hunkers down, and they're delighted to learn that he's a very stupid adult who doesn't know any of the ordinary little games and nursery rhymes that they all know. Quentin lets them run him from one end of the orchard to the other cramming Fillorian kid-folklore down his throat, and it's exhausting and – a little bit fun. It's not how he'd want to live his life, but a couple of times a year, it's nice to be surrounded by people who just accept that he's a weirdo, but their weirdo.

Eliot stands a good four inches taller than everyone else, so he's difficult to lose in a crowd, but Quentin only catches sight of him occasionally. He's making friends with the cousins and all that, working the crowd like a ropeline. Of course he is. Eliot fits in everywhere; Quentin's known him for ten years, and he's never seen Eliot look adrift around people.

He has seen Eliot look out of place, but only when he thinks he's alone and unobserved, sipping his wine by a dying fire and staring moodily into the smoke. Quentin's no psychic, but he knows that tight, humming tension under Eliot's skin, that urge to take flight – figuratively or possibly literally. It's hard for Eliot, having nowhere to go.

This quest is so much harder for Eliot than it's turned out to be for Quentin, and it's not fair. Quentin needs to be as gentle with Eliot as he can.

So when Eliot starts making his excuses and his goodbyes after dinner – friends he's promised to meet for a drink while he's in town, otherwise he'd stay the night, of course he would, surely next time he'll have to – Quentin just throws him a casual little smile and wave. Tells him they'll meet him at the tavern in the morning. Tells him to have fun. “Oh, well, maybe a little fun,” Eliot says lightly. “If you insist.”

Quentin smiles at him. He has to smile-- Eliot needs-- It's not fair to--

If Eliot's found someone he wants to meet for more than a drink, then good for him, right? Quentin believes that completely – in the abstract. In the abstract, he's never had a problem with Eliot being with someone.

Eliot being with someone who has a name and a face and blue eyes and freckles on his hands –

Well, it's not any different, right? Why should it be? Nothing is any different now, compared to what things were like this morning when Quentin was in such a good mood, so he can't – go around acting like it is. Fortunately, there's still a lot of party left, which is just enough sensory overload to distract Quentin from his own dysfunctional, petty thoughts.

(Jealous thoughts. He should really name them. Emotions – you're supposed to name them, right? So you can process them? This is jealousy, he feels jealous.)

The guilt doesn't kick in until late that night, when he carries a sleepy Ted upstairs to the little bedroom that used to be Arielles – Arielle and her sister's when they were little, and then just Ari's alone, during the years when she was the last of the girls to stay behind and help in the orchard. The bed is larger than theirs at home, more than large enough for two little girls and downright luxurious by Fillorian standards for a single person, but the three of them fill it up pretty completely, especially at Arielle's current size.

“I didn't say goodnight to Uncle Eliot,” Ted complains sleepily as he burrows between his parents.

“Uncle Eliot left early, remember?” Arielle says, sounding almost as sleepy as the four-year-old. “He went back to the tavern to sleep there.”

“Oh,” Ted says. “Well, okay.”

Quentin laughs, feeling a little dizzy, claustrophobic – guilty – lost, he feels so far from home, he wants to be at _home_ tonight. “It's okay,” he says to Ted. “Yeah, it's okay.”

In the darkness, his hand reaches out and finds Arielle's hand, and she squeezes. It's okay. It's okay. Everything's good. He has his family.

He has Eliot. Just because Eliot's a little further away tonight than he usually is, that doesn't mean Quentin's lost him. He hasn't. He won't.

They're complicated, but. They're family.

By morning everything is better, and Quentin's primary emotion is embarrassment for letting himself get so weirdly caught up in basically nothing. Eliot went out for the night and whatever happened is what happened and honestly, what does it matter?

(It doesn't matter if he came to Eliot's room, and if he knelt on the bed over Eliot's body and let Eliot's big hands push his shirt up and off, let Eliot undo buttons and belt and the braided cord holding his hair back. It doesn't matter if Eliot murmured throaty compliments as he ghosted the tips of his fingers over his neck, called him _my darling_ and _so lovely_ and _god all the things I want to do to you_.... It doesn't matter if he sucked Eliot's earlobe and made him tremble, if he figured out how to roll and pinch Eliot's nipples until they're hard and he growls and then licks them until he begs and threatens, _oh you brat, you pretty little cocktease, stop playing around and give me that mouth for real_... So what, so what, so what. It doesn't matter.)

(It never really did, did it?)

Well, Quentin hopes it was – nice, whatever it was. He had a pretty good trip, so he hopes Eliot did too, period, full stop, end of story.

Arielle brings Eliot slices of ginger wrapped in cheesecloth, and he smiles ruefully at her and sticks two of them in his mouth at once. “How's your head?” Arielle asks him.

“Which one?” Eliot says, and he looks a little bit embarrassed himself. Eliot hates being hungover; he views it as a personal weakness, or possibly as an unseemly quarrel between his physical body and his oldest and most reliable friend.

“Are you sick, Eliot?” Ted asks as Eliot picks him up.

Eliot gives his cheek a smacking kiss and says, “Oh, for a few more hours, maybe. After that I'll be fine, I promise.”

They load Applebear up with the shopping haul, but this time he just rolls his eyes and doesn't complain, and when they get home Quentin makes sure to add a tip to the agreed-upon fee. He's not even completely sure that tipping is a thing they do in Fillory, but maybe Applebear will take it as an apology for whatever Eliot did to him in that card game. (How the _fuck_ does he deal the--? Whatever, never mind.)

They've only been gone for a day, but it feels like there's a lot to put back in order, when you factor in all the unpacking they have to do, plus the garden and the stove and the wine shed and the Mosaic and all the usual pieces and parts involved with making this place function. Quentin's happy to be back to it, honestly. It's – special, you know? Not for Ari, he guesses it's normal to her, but for Quentin, the way Quentin grew up, it feels like a gift he didn't know he needed, to have work to do that's real work, that feeds and builds and fixes, things he can share with the people he loves, things that will hopefully create some good in a broken world. Maybe they'll even save magic and all of Fillory, but – maybe they won't, and that's. Sad, that would be really sad and hard, but Quentin still can't imagine ever saying _nothing's ever going to mean anything_ or _it doesn't matter what happens to me_. He's not perfect, life's not perfect, but that curse is lifted off his shoulders forever, he knows.

It is a gift. He's lucky, he's so lucky to be here, working and raising his kids and sharing everything he has with his wife and his best friend. It's just an old, bad habit from an outgrown life that makes him...forget sometimes. That makes him turn in on himself and feel too small and too needy and grasp after what doesn't belong to him.

Quentin's not that person. He almost ruined his friendship with Julia by being that person, but he was young and stupid then. He's a better friend to Eliot than he was ever capable of being a decade ago. He can hold himself to a higher standard.

So when he gets a chance later that afternoon, when it's just the two of them working side-by-side at their latest pattern, he turns toward Eliot and says, “Um. Hey.”

“Mm,” Eliot says. “I know your _hey, let's talk about feelings_ hey.”

“Do I have one of those?” Quentin says.

Eliot raises an eyebrow at him. “Gonna prove me wrong?”

Quentin huffs out a laugh and looks down, scratching the back of his neck. “I guess not. I'll make it fast, okay?” Eliot sweeps his arm out in a _no, after you_ gesture, then picks up a tile and keeps working. That's fine, that's probably better. “So,” Quentin says. “Uh. Buldark.”

That must not have been what Eliot expected, because he looks sharply in Quentin's direction and cocks his head, scanning Quentin's face curiously. “Buldark?”

“Yeah, the guy, the tailor--” Obviously. God. Quentin takes a breath and tries again. “I just. Kind of wondered if he was – the friend you were meeting last night. You two seemed. Like friends.”

“I met several people,” Eliot says. “I know more than one person in town. I do kind of wish I hadn't let _all_ of them buy me a drink, but that's neither here nor there.”

Quentin chuckles, mostly out of politeness. “Okay, just. I thought he was cute, and – you seemed to get along.”

“He is and we do,” Eliot says. “Q, you can – really just say it. Whatever you want to say.”

Can he? Quentin guesses he can. Only one way to find out. “If you want to bring him up here to visit sometime, you can.” That really must not be what Eliot expected, from his expression. “I mean,” Quentin says. “If you want. Or – or, I mean, someone else, if you want. You don't have to – if there's someone you like, you don't have to wait – until you're away from home. You don't have to sneak around.”

“I'm not sneaking around,” Eliot says. “You think I'm hiding a secret boyfriend from you?”

“No,” Quentin says defensively. “But I think if you really liked someone, it would be pretty hard to turn him into a boyfriend if you can't ever spend the night with him, or like – cook for him, or – introduce him to your family. So I'm just saying....”

Eliot's keen-eyed expression softens a little and he shakes his head as if Quentin's doing something adorable and foolish. “You know me better than that,” he chides. “I'm not harboring a secret desire for a meaningful relationship, darling, I promise. Not with Buldark or anyone else.”

Of course not. Quentin doesn't know if that's – a relief, or kind of sad, or what. “Well,” he says. “We just. Would try to make anyone feel welcome, you know? If he was...important to you.”

“I know you would,” Eliot says, and to Quentin's surprise, he reaches out and puts his hand lightly on Quentin's back. He really hardly ever touches Quentin for no reason anymore. “I like the way things are,” Eliot says. Quentin nods; he does, too, he really does. “But – thank you. I like it that you still. Look out for me like that. It really does...mean something to me.”

“Okay,” Quentin says, when Eliot exhales like he's gotten out everything he needs or wants to say. “Feelings-conversation officially over, achievement unlocked. You lived.”

“It was almost painless,” Eliot laughs. His hand slides away, and Quentin pretends that he can't still feel the heat of it through his shirt. “God, is this what maturity feels like?”

“Guess so,” Quentin says.

They agree they're going to eat lightly for dinner, but that only turns out to mean bowls of broth and then a whole batch of plum heavies shared between the four of them. Quentin works on teaching Ted how to shuffle cards, and Eliot and Arielle go back and forth between singing Rolling in the Deep with long, lavish glissandes of harmony and brainstorming ideas for the infamous red dress. Ari wants to wear it to the harvest festival this year, but that gives her months and months to decide how it should look, so right now they're daydreaming aloud more than they're actually making plans.

It's good, it's a good night, and Quentin doesn't know if he – handled everything appropriately, but he must have done all right if they're still this happy, all of them. Quentin remembers it all later on – the plum heavies, the lazy debate about buttons versus lacing, _you had my heart inside of your hand_ – and he isn't sure why. It wasn't the first or the last night of anything. It wasn't special at all, except in the way that everything is.

The dress never does get made. They wrap the baby in the red cloth and bury her in her mother's arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arielle's death is referenced at the end of this chapter, and the death of Arielle and Quentin's stillborn second child.


	9. Interlude: Christmas

When the first snow falls on Fillory, it truly is the most wonderful time of the year – or not, depending on your tastes, but it is the one time of year when Quentin is prone to random bursts of song, and that's – an experience.

He only likes It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, along with a few other secular standards, which is fine with Eliot. It's not like he wants to hear Quentin try to yowl his way through O Holy Night or anything. Eliot loves the man just desperately, but no one has _ever_ been loved that well.

Fillory doesn't have much in the way of winter holidays, but the first snowfall is a kind of nationwide field day, and Quentin likes to make a thing about it. Teaching Ted about his Earth heritage, Eliot supposes. Anyway, Eliot bakes something like fruitcake, and Quentin goes way down into the forest to forage holly branches, and they cook a goose and have presents and tell stories about Rudolph and Frosty and Jesus and whatnot, and it's all – fine, it's nice. It means something to Q, anyway. Reminds him of his father, Eliot thinks.

Every year they hang a stocking by the central heatstove for Ted. Arielle made it the year Ted was born.

This year is....

Yeah. Well.

Q hasn't been singing much lately, even compared to the not much that he sings normally. But the snow starts falling around sunset, and when Eliot comes in from covering the broad beans and the garlic in their winter beds, shaking the wet mess out of his hair, the first thing he hears is the distinctive low burr of Quentin's hesitant singing voice, trying his off-key best at, “ _And since we've no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow._ ”

God, he's _trying_. He always tries, with fists and teeth and his whole huge heart, to – make things work, to make them okay again. Eliot's in awe of him, honestly. Without a drop of irony, he honestly is.

Quentin's also doing something on the kitchen side of the cabin, which Eliot suspects involves wreaking mischief on the fruitcake. Eliot smiles and grabs Quentin's wrist, twirling him away from the danger zone of the breadbox and simultaneously granting him the mercy of drowning him out entirely with, “ _The fire is slowly dying, and my dear, we're still goodbye-ing, but as long as you love me so, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow_.”

Smiling wryly at being caught meddling, Quentin lets his hand pull loose with a quick squeeze to Eliot's hand. “Um, I was looking for the nuts? The, uh, for roasting, were we going to – roast those tonight?” he lies directly to Eliot's face.

“Mm, allow me,” Eliot says. “Why don't you, a known cake thief, just take a seat, all right, darling?”

Quentin presses a hand over his heart and says, “Perish the thought,” in a vaguely Mid-Atlantic drawl that Eliot suspects is an attempt at mockery.

He seems like he's in a good mood, all things considered. The days have been more good than bad lately; the last real disaster was when Q couldn't make himself face the harvest festival, so he stayed in bed while Eliot took Teddy to spend the day with his family – Ari's family. It wasn't great; Ted was disappointed and Quentin was frustrated with himself and Eliot was utterly helpless and therefore a trifle cranky.

But that was over a month ago, and in spite of a few distracted days, a few nights when words failed and he just needed to slump exhausted into Eliot's arms until he dozed off, things have been – you know, better. Pretty good.

Quentin tries so hard, for Ted's sake. Eliot wouldn't say that as a – household, as a – family? – they've really established any sense of normalcy in the past four – almost five months, but they've done what needed doing. They've done their best.

They all have scars, but they've all been – more generous with their love than Eliot knew people could be. That has to count for something. Maybe it's too late to give Ted the happy childhood that the sweet little spud deserves, but no one can say they've been stingy in loving him.

What more can they do? Eliot knows that Q has taken Ari's death on, as he takes on so much, as a personal fault of his, like he directly murdered her with his dick, but that's Q. Eliot likes to think of himself as the rational one, and no matter how many times Eliot goes over the patterns in his head, he can't unwind the maze. What can they do, what could they have done, how could it ever have gone differently? None of it was up to them except for the part about Q's dick, and quite frankly even that, Eliot's pretty sure, was not as much up to either of them as it was up to Arielle, once she made up her mind about what she wanted.

Eliot was a little bit in awe of her, too, unironically. She was always so good at going after what she wanted. She was maybe the most honest person he ever knew.

It's so fucked up that she's gone.

It's so fucked up that Eliot never cried about it. He doesn't know what's wrong with him.

Eliot stands firm on not allowing bites to be snuck out of tomorrow's after-goose dessert, but he pours cinnamon syrup on the toasted nuts to soften the blow. And that's pretty generous of him, Eliot thinks, since he made that batch of syrup so he could have a hot toddy with a kick as his Christmas Eve treat, and here he is, sharing it out of the goodness of his heart. Ted has his father's sweet tooth, and the two of them clean the skillet out pretty thoroughly, getting their tongues and fingers sticky and singed. Children.

The three of them crowd onto the floor by the fireplace, Ted nested in Quentin's lap, and they drink tea and teach Ted Deck the Halls and Here Comes Santa Claus as the shadows of the falling snow streak down their little windows in the dark. Ted has made chalk drawings for both of them, neatly rolled up as little scrolls with ribbons; Eliot's is a dragon and Quentin's is a river scene with a large family of turtles on the rocks, and Eliot doesn't know the standards by which five-year-old art is generally judged, but he thinks they're pretty good. You can tell the dragon and the river apart and everything.

They let Ted open his present, which is a Fillorian board game with pips on wooden tiles, something like a cross between Scrabble and dominoes; Quentin's been up late for weeks carving the tiles and the box. Eliot has spent almost that much time covertly testing donut recipes out back while Quentin was occupied with their actual job, that whole saving the world thing, and it's totally worth it when he can present Quentin with half a dozen perfect rings of glazed fried dough.

Eliot expects something similarly homemade for his own gift, so he's surprised when he opens what's obviously not Quentin's handiwork – a bracelet made of braided wire and an interlaced leather cord, hung with a small but heavy round silver charm, the face of a compass rose. “Oh,” Eliot says. “I didn't know we were....” Spending that much? At the jewelry stage of our relationship? He doesn't know how to finish that sentence. He doesn't know what to say.

Quentin doesn't wait for Eliot to get it together, he leans over and plucks the bracelet out of the box himself and clasps it around Eliot's wrist. “There,” he says, lightly teasing. “You can't say you don't have accessory options anymore.”

“What's an accessory option?” Ted says, sounding it out carefully.

Eliot tries to shake off the – strange feeling in his chest, tries to focus on a world larger than the one wrapped around his wrist. “Accessories are the things you wear that aren't your shirt and pants,” he tells Ted. “Like your shoes and your belt and jewelry, if you have it.”

Ted reaches out and grabs Eliot's hand, because that's apparently a thing everyone's allowed to do now. “I like your rings,” he says, his little fingers squeezing around Eliot's wedding band. “Can I have a ring like yours next Christmas?”

“Oh – maybe stick with toys a few more years,” Eliot says, carefully disengaging his hand. “Plenty of time for rings when you're older.”

“Is underwear an accessory?”

“Well, that depends on the type of event you're attending,” Eliot says seriously, and Quentin thumps him in the knee with his fist. Eliot grins at him, but then sobers up and says, “It's beautiful-- Q,” he ends awkwardly, when his usual _darling_ sticks in his throat for some reason.

All of a sudden, comfortable as the pet name normally is, it feels – inappropriately over-familiar. Maybe because of what feels like a slightly over-familiar gift. Maybe because of the way Quentin's eyes keep flickering warmly over Eliot's hands and his face.

“Do you really like it?” Quentin says. “I mean, if you hate it, you don't really have to--”

“I don't hate it,” he says. “It's. Beautiful. It really is. Thank you.”

Up well past his bedtime, Ted begins to squirm around in Quentin's lap, fingers gripping Quentin's shirt while he tries to resist his yawns. “Okay, bud,” Quentin finally says softly, rubbing Ted's back. “Let's get you to bed, what do you say? Then we'll see what's in the stocking tomorrow morning.”

Ted squirms even harder until he's worked himself in a circle with his arms around Quentin's neck, and he leans in and whispers something in Quentin's ear that makes Quentin – smile and flinch a little at the same time. “Yeah,” he says softly. “We all do. But – you know, what's funny is, you can really, really miss someone and be sad about it, and at the same time you can feel happy about the good things. Like I'm happy that you're here. What's something you're happy about?”

“That you shared your donuts,” Ted says in an unsubtly wheedling sort of way.

Quentin laughs and kisses his head. “Okay, good info. I'll keep that in mind when I'm deciding what to do with the rest of them. Now say goodnight to Eliot, okay?”

Eliot leans forward when Ted twists around so that he can get his neck hugged, too, Ted's warm face pressed to Eliot's and sleepy _goodnight_ and _merry Christmas_ murmured in his ear. Eliot pats his little arm.

Eliot takes the opportunity, while Quentin is tucking the spud into bed, to turn their empty tea mugs into mugs full of hot toddy, and he's back on the floor in front of the sparking fire when Quentin backs out of the alcove and closes the curtain before tracing a soundproofing charm over it.

“Thanks,” Quentin says when he sits down again and Eliot pushes the warm mug into his hands.

“Mm,” Eliot says. “You know, we might have to add onto that room someday. He's getting bigger.”

Quentin smiles a little. “You volunteering?”

“Why not? I'm the one who fixed it up to start with.”

Quentin chuckles. “That's one way to put it. I kind of remember it as you taking a hammer to the inside of our pantry and ripping down all the shelves in a low-key Jack Torrance kind of way.”

“I _renovated_ the old pantry into a nursery,” Eliot says. Quentin gives him a you're-full-of-shit kind of look, and Eliot relents a little. “I might've been working out some emotional stuff at the same time.”

“I wish I'd known how to help you,” Quentin says, suspiciously earnest all of a sudden. God, who wants to be _earnest_ on _Christmas_?

That particular wish, however – that Eliot understands all too well. “You couldn't,” he says kindly. “Any more than I can help you now. People sometimes just have to...go through the process on their own.”

“But you did help me,” Quentin says. “You do, every day.”

Eliot shrugs. Sure, in practical terms, he's pitched in. But that doesn't mean.... All the work, every step of it, has still been Quentin's to do. Grief is kind of quest in that way, Eliot guesses – or at least kind of like their shitty, repetitive quest. One pattern after another, and you may not feel like you're making any progress, but you don't get to quit laying down the tiles.

“How are you?” Eliot asks, shifting to the side a little and bracing his elbow on the bed behind them, leaning his head on his hand.

Quentin shrugs and takes a sip of his drink. “Okay, I guess,” he says, and it's not ringing, but he sounds like he means it, at least. He smiles a little and says, “I can do hard things.” Quentin mirrors Eliot's movement, angling sideways and putting his arm up on the bed so they're facing each other. He sets his mug down and then takes Eliot's mug from his free hand, setting it down between them as well, and before Eliot has come up with any theories about what they're doing, Quentin slips the side of his hand under Eliot's palm, drawing his hand a little closer and running his thumb over the smooth ring on Eliot's finger. “Why do you still wear it?” he asks. “It's not because of Fen, is it? You were never – that close to her, and I never thought you – missed her that much? But it's been so long, and you never took the ring off.”

Eliot pulls his hand free, mostly because he really wants to finish that drink. “Truthfully?” he says after he's taken another sip, and Quentin nods. Of course truthfully; that wasn't a real question, just playing for time while he gathers his thoughts. “It's not because of Fen, but it is because of – my wedding. You know, before – before all that, I never really. I don't think I ever made a choice that couldn't be taken back again. I did things, obviously. Things that – that couldn't be undone, but they were always in the heat of the moment. Like something that spun out of control. But by that point in my life, I'd.... All those things I'd done on impulse or instinct, they'd all. Well, none of them really felt like great moments of victory. And they'd just told me I was supposed to be a king now, and.... I don't know, I just didn't want to keep managing my affairs in permanent crisis mode like that. The little power I already had.... I'd killed two people. It felt like if they gave me a crown and an army or whatever, I could kill a lot more people if I didn't pull it together. And there was the Beast and the Leo Blade and everything, and.... I don't know. I just thought, it's time to do something right, and to do it on purpose. So I guess – here I am now, and that wasn't the plan, but I still-- I had a plan, and I stuck to it the best I knew how, and. I don't have the crown anymore, but when I see this, it always...reminds me that I was a king once.”

Was he a good king? Well, reviews were mixed. But Eliot sleeps a little easier at night knowing that he did his best – that in spite of his every instinct, he.... Great power, great responsibility, all that. Kingship was something he stumbled into through no fault of his own, but he did his best to play his role responsibly, even when it involved – sacrifice.

Eliot's never sacrificed for anything in his whole life, except for Fillory. That's not really something to be proud of, on balance, but. His one single sacrifice was really a _sacrifice_. It's not illegal to be a little bit proud, is it?

“I think you still are,” Quentin says.

The laugh that rises in Eliot's throat meets the alcohol coming down, and he almost chokes. He gestures with the empty mug, a sweeping arc from one side of the cabin to the other. “Behold my throne room.”

Quentin rolls his eyes and says, “You know what I mean.”

“In my blood?” Eliot says dryly.

“I mean – why is that so crazy?” Quentin says. “Everything about magic is kind of crazy, but it also. It also makes a weird kind of sense, when you look at it with, like – magic-logic. There was something about you that fit the, the vision that Ember and Umber had for Fillory.”

Eliot doesn't at all know that he feels complimented by that. “Knowing those two,” he says, “they probably set up the magic to just pick the tallest person in the room.”

“Or maybe just the person who _felt_ the tallest,” Quentin says with a suspicious little sparkle in his eyes as he finishes off his drink. “This is good, by the way.”

“It's hot that you're a whiskey guy,” Eliot says. “I'm almost inclined to forgive your shitty palate for wine.”

“It's hot that you're a wine snob,” Quentin says, and maybe it's the whiskey, but he's really doubling down on the sparkly thing right now.

If Eliot's being honest with himself, it's not the whiskey. If Eliot's being honest, he knows exactly what desire looks like in Quentin's eyes.

“Wine snob?” he repeats as though baffled by the accusation. “Darling, are you saying I'm not a man of the people?”

“Eliot Waugh, the Champagne King?” Quentin teases. “Yeah, I think I'd kind of look elsewhere if I were into the populist thing.”

Well, that's an opening. “And what would you be _into_ ,” Eliot asks sweetly, “if you were looking for me?”

He half-expects that to cross a line of some kind, expects Quentin to blush and turn awkward and try to play things off. He's ready for that. They're up late and they've had a couple of drinks and it's natural to want to flirt a little, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything. Eliot understands. He won't make anything out of it, and when Quentin pulls away, Eliot won't chase. It's nice that Quentin is feeling relaxed enough to come this far.

He doesn't expect Quentin to lean in further and curl his fingers around Eliot's suspender. “Oh, I don't know,” Quentin says softly while Eliot's brain spins in idling circles. “Something spectacular, I guess.”

Rather than trying to – make a choice, which would require things like _information_ and _a working prefrontal cortex_ , Eliot just lets his eyelids drift half-shut, dropping into his body and into all those instincts that have served him so poorly in the past, the source of all of his multitude of pleasures and hungers and sins. On instinct, he lifts his hand, and he can feel the sway of the charm against his wrist as he folds a lock of Quentin's hair behind his ear. “Are you sure about this?” he says, his voice so low and soft that it barely travels the inches between their faces.

“I think... I think I'm ready,” Quentin says.

Eliot leans back just a little, but he doesn't drop his hand. He just lets his fingers go where they want to go, wandering down below Quentin's ear and behind the hinge of his jaw. “I've heard more persuasive yeses.”

All the playfulness seems gone from the room now, and when Quentin meets his eyes there's no sparkle at all, just the full force of Quentin's stubborn sincerity, exposed and undefended. “I still miss her every day, but I don't know if that's ever going to change,” he says. “All I know is – I'm ready to be happy again, and...I trust you for that. You always made me so--”

Yeah. Close enough.

Eliot cups his hands around Quentin's face and cuts him off with a kiss, but he doesn't want to assume that he knows exactly what Quentin needs tonight, so he starts things off slow, just a slow press of lips and mingled breath. Quentin relaxes into his touch, and Eliot thinks that – he could be satisfied by this, if necessary. He could trade skin-heat and taste and this trembling intimacy with Quentin, mutual comfort, mutual care, and it would be enough. He thinks it would be. It always has been.

That's a little bit of a lie. Nothing is ever enough for Eliot; _nothing_ is ever enough to quiet the low, lifelong keen of wanting what he can't have. But Quentin-- well, he's always the exception to the rule. If all Quentin wants is – is a little bit of pleasure, is companionship, something warm to keep him through the winter, then Eliot can provide that and be happy to help.

“Are you _singing_?” Quentin laughs as they break apart.

And maybe Eliot was humming a little, admittedly. Sometimes he just can't help himself. “ _But if you really hold me tight_ ,” he sings, a hoarse little whisper, not a performance but a gift, “ _all the way home I'll be warm_.”

“You're unbelievable,” Quentin says, rather ambiguously, and then he kisses Eliot again.

And again. More.

It escalates quickly, once Quentin takes charge. He kisses Eliot like a demand, like desperation, one arm winding around Eliot as he shifts forward, pushes up, sneaks into Eliot's lap while his hand works under Eliot's open collar and his tongue works in sharp curls over the shape of Eliot's lip, then inside. Eliot breathes into it as much as he can, settles his hands low on Quentin's back and lets Quentin search for whatever he needs, whatever he wants.

The more Eliot lets him have, the more Quentin seems to want, until he's groaning softly against Eliot's mouth, nudging their noses close togther, flexing his fingers on the bare skin of Eliot's shoulder. “Fuck,” he manages to say. “El, is this – is this okay?” Eliot nods. He's fairly sure he nods, but either it's not a real thing or it's not enough, because Quentin nuzzles harder against his face, grips the back of Eliot's shirt tighter in his fist, and says, “Please tell me – El, don't you want-- ?”

He needs air, he needs air to live and also to think, but filling his lungs produces a sound he didn't mean to make, an artless, unbeautiful cry that's _yes_ , that's _yes, I want_ , that's _yes, I want you, I want you always, please don't stop, please come home...._

Quentin kisses him again, kisses him like there's no time left to lose, his tongue prying Eliot's mouth open and diving, delving into the heat of Eliot's body like he needs to find a way to crack Eliot open and expose everything that's hidden about him. It should feel invasive, but it doesn't. Eliot can't remember ever not wanting to be shattered apart by this, or not wanting Quentin to be the one who sifts through the pieces.

Even in his current state, which is only barely anchored to three-dimensional reality, Eliot remembers to keep his hand protectively behind Quentin's skull while Eliot tips him over and lowers him to his back, chasing him down with more and more kisses. Quentin squirms against the abrasive straw mat like it's crushed velvet, like he's never been anywhere as agreeable as right here, and he spreads his legs as much as the narrow space between bed and fire allows, making all the room he can for Eliot to fit down against him. His hands skim over Eliot's shoulders, pushing his suspenders off, until Eliot grabs for one hand and pushes it up over Quentin's head, using his own palm pressed down against Quentin's to hold himself up while he unbuttons his pants. “Yeah,” Quentin urges him, breathless and dark and just a little bit smug, which is an aftertaste that only whiskey ever seems to bring out of him. His fingers curl up through Eliot's. “Yeah, let me have it, come on.”

“Fuck,” Eliot mutters into sloppy kisses as he pulls his cock out. “Okay, yeah.”

But there's some piece of his brain that hasn't whited out yet, a noisy buzzsaw of logic telling him _this is happening too fast_ , telling him _everything could change and you don't even know how_. And Eliot – doesn't want things to change, does he? Or maybe he does, but how can he even make that decision when he doesn't know what his options are, doesn't know anything at all? Jesus Christ, he's got _his dick in his hand_ and he's got _Quentin underneath him_ , and he doesn't even know if....

“Hey,” Quentin says gently. Eliot focuses in on him, flushed skin and tangled hair and his shirt rucked up around his ribs, but his eyes are deep and steady and careful. He's being careful with Eliot, and that's – kind of the thing that's unique about Quentin, isn't it? “How are you?”

“Good,” Eliot says automatically. Why wouldn't he be good? He wants this, _he wants this_ , what is there to be – other than good about?

“You want to slow it down a little?” Quentin suggests. “No rush, you know.”

Oh, fuck logic, honestly. They can drown that shit out. Eliot smiles his wickedest smile down at Quentin and says, “Please, since when do you like foreplay?”

Quentin laughs. God, nothing has ever felt better than Quentin's laugh vibrating through his body and into Eliot's. “That's great, that's exactly how I like my former lovers to remember me. Very sexy.”

“It's pretty sexy,” Eliot says, nuzzling up under Quentin's jaw. “How you're always so ready for it...”

“Yeah, that's--” Quentin says breathlessly. Eliot can feel his throat work around empty air as he swallows. “Get to the good stuff, that's – my motto --”

Eliot kisses him. He wraps his hands firmly around Quentin's forearms, holding them to the floor, and his cock settles against the heat and the quivering muscle of Quentin's abdomen, prying a long, groaning gasp out of Quentin's throat as his knees come together, closing around Eliot's hips. Quentin's hands flex and open, again and again, and Eliot can feel the tension in his arms. “Still wanna slow it down?” Eliot murmurs against Quentin's ear, rocking down against him with his whole body.

“That was – for you,” Quentin gasps, flashing that feral smile that Eliot hasn't seen in – god, so long. So fucking long. “Case you couldn't keep up, y'know.”

“Bitch,” Eliot grumbles, and Quentin shakes his head. “Brat,” Eliot tries again, and Quentin grins, lifting his head in search of Eliot's mouth just like he's arching his back in search of the feeling of Eliot's hard cock trailing precome on his skin.

Eliot kisses him. More. Again. Quentin's hands curl into fists, his legs hiking up and folding around Eliot. They need lube, but neither of them want to let go of the other long enough for the tut, so instead of friction they have weight and pressure and Quentin's lovely firm thighs dragging Eliot in as they rock back and forth, dancing. Eliot hears someone's button pull loose from the grinding together of their shirts, and it skitters away in the straw. “Fuck you, let me go,” Quentin mumbles against his lips, sounding more amused than anything else. “Let me touch you.”

Eliot rubs his thumbs up the inside of Quentin's wrists. He can feel the beat of Quentin's pulse, the strong gallop of his heart. “Listen,” Eliot makes himself say, feeling breathless and impatient and so goddamn tender. “If I get to be with you once a decade, I want creative control.”

That was – too honest, probably. Maybe he can blame the whiskey?

Quentin's eyes flutter open, a little glassy but totally without fear. Unironically, Eliot loves every atom of this fearless man. “More than--” Quentin says raspily, before he clears his throat and says, “You can be with me – more.” Because maybe Quentin knows, maybe he really does know who Eliot is and what Eliot wants, what he's always wanted, how he's – _sacrificed_ for this, he has, he's sacrificed for this, too. Eliot's been patient, he's been loyal, he's waited and waited and basically never complained. He's given Q as much as he had it in him to give, and no one can say-- You can say a lot about Eliot, you can, and you wouldn't be wrong, but no one can say he's been stingy with the love he has for Quentin. He's emptied himself out on the fucking _ground_ for Quentin, and he – he's earned this, hasn't he?

He's not a good person in the same way that Quentin is good, but. Against his every instinct, he has...tried.

Do you get a reward for trying your hardest? Is that the kind of story that Eliot's living in now? The playmate who wakes up one day and loves him, no price higher than Eliot can afford to pay, no bill from here on out that's due in blood?

Eliot presses a kiss to Quentin's lips, hard and sweet as candy. “As much as you want, darling,” he says. “Just say the word.”

“ _Eliot_ ,” Quentin says, harsh and desperate, almost panicky, squeezing his eyes shut again as his body locks harder around Eliot's, jerking in a string of shudders that are almost spasms. Instinctively, Eliot bears down to ground him, tightens his hands around Quentin's forearms until the tips of his fingers go white and red where they press into Quentin's skin.

It's the sound of Quentin's laughter that shocks Eliot into reality – Quentin laughing with a broad edge of hysteria as his muscles release and his legs slide away, sticky and slack and wild. Eliot feels the same laughter fizzing in his chest, but he doesn't give in to it. He just nuzzles a little smile against Quentin's lips, moving his hands to rake Quentin's hair gently away from his face. “You're okay,” Eliot murmurs. “Breathe, just breathe.”

The breathing thing comes under control, and Quentin's laughter subsides on a long sigh. “Oh, fuck,” he says weakly. “Sorry.”

Eliot's not. He kisses Quentin's cheek lightly and says, “It's flattering.”

Quentin turns his head slightly, just enough to give himself room to rub a hand over his eyes. When he looks back at Eliot, his face is relaxed and his eyes bright. He looks like there's a non-zero risk that he might try to sing again, but instead he says, “I'll suck you?”

Eliot feels the curl of a smile taking over his face and says, “I'll let you.”

It's so easy, once they let gravity and memory take over. The way their hands tangle together when they help each other up, when they strip Eliot's pants off together. The feel of Quentin's threadbare old quilt under Eliot's ass as he sits on the edge of the bed (Eliot pushes down the sense that it's _Ari's_ bed, that he's robbing a friend's grave, because if he's not going to let that stop him, then what's the use in being maudlin about it?). The way Quentin kisses the inside of Eliot's knee, such a fond, almost absent little gesture on the way to his hands sliding into more interesting locations. Even the snaky shadows of snow outside the windows, the eddies of cold air threading in underneath their badly insulated door, chilling Eliot's toes. He knows these things. This house, these hands, that smile, that hair under his fingers, the sigh of satisfaction that Quentin makes when he has the head of Eliot's cock between his lips. Eliot knows these things. He never forgot, never could.

He works his fingers through the slightly oily strands of Quentin's hair, rubs circles against Quentin's scalp. He gazes down, safe in a bubble of total privacy while Quentin's hand and mouth and full attention are focused on Eliot's dick, and like most things in Fillory, it's terrifyingly real while simultaneously being – somewhat unrealistic.

They were kings once. Eliot palms the crown of Quentin's head while Quentin is on his knees, and Eliot remembers being the one kneeling, and Quentin with a crown in his hands, flower petals shaking down from the sky instead of snow, and _For what it's worth...._ None of it feels real, but it changed everything.

Fillory's like that. Quentin is like that.

Eliot was free once. He ran away from home and he accepted no limits and he gave no fucks and he was bigger and fiercer and wilder than anyone he'd ever met, and everything felt ecstatic, even the pain, because all of it was his choice and it belonged to him. And then a man said _From one fall-down drunk to another..._ and it changed everything.

Brakebills. Fillory. Quentin.

Eliot grabs the bracelet around his wrists and hooks his finger in it, pulling it tight enough to leave indentations in the skin, tight enough to thin the blood flow. _None of this is real_ , he thinks dizzily, listening to the soft, guttural cries fall out of his mouth. But it changes everything. _For what it's worth._

He can feel them around each of his limbs like he's shackled in place, these things that rob Eliot of his freedom: _Brakebills. Fillory. Quentin. The Mosaic._ But seriously, what the fuck did he ever do with freedom anyway, other than crush it up and snort it, then need more of it tomorrow?

This is better, right? This is – love or something. Happiness. These things that took everything from him – _BrakebillsFilloryQuentinTheMosaic_ – they gave him worlds and crowns and home and family and locks and chains and rings and vows and love and beauty and love and love....

Once he starts coming, it feels like he can't stop. Like even his body knows that when he takes his dick out of Quentin's mouth, the clock starts again on reality.

But eventually he has to do that. “Fuck,” he mumbles, watching Quentin lift the hem of his shirt to wipe jizz and drool off his face. “What the fuck,” he says, mostly just to make sounds.

Quentin laughs a little awkwardly and uses Eliot's knee to lever himself up to his feet so he can start peeling out of his clothes. “I know we probably have to – like, talk about this or whatever,” he says, not quite meeting Eliot's eyes. “But can we just do that tomorrow? I'd really rather-- you know, just because. It's so late, and we're kind of loopy, so I think. Tomorrow's better.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says. “Or maybe it's a Boxing Day kind of conversation.” Quentin smiles at him, weary but sincere.

They use a combination of magic and not giving a shit to make themselves suitable for bed, and they pretend to get comfortable, even though Eliot has entirely forgotten the mechanics of sharing a bed this small and Quentin – has his own shit to deal with that doesn't have much to do with Eliot at all.

But it works. It's all under there somewhere, the muscle memory, and Eliot figures out how to use the blanket and his arm to tuck Quentin in, sheltering him against Eliot's chest. Quentin rests a hand half on Eliot's ass, picking idly at the waistband of Eliot's underwear in a way that's more sleepy-fidgety than suggestive, and says, “Regrets?”

“Not currently,” Eliot says. “Check back tomorrow.” He regrets not getting further through that bottle of whiskey, but he thinks if he says that, Quentin will read something into it. It was just good whiskey, that's all.

He can feel the side of Quentin's smile pressed up against his bicep. “Okay.”

In the morning, Eliot wakes up in Quentin's bed with Quentin watching him. Eliot watches back for a minute before he smiles and touches a fingertip between Q's brows and says in a morning rasp, “I can see you overthinking.”

Quentin smiles. “Pretty sure I'm just regular-thinking.”

“Don't think at all,” Eliot says.

That wasn't the conversation he originally envisioned having, but – honestly, isn't he on to something here? They've gotten hopelessly lost in the weeds before, trying to parse out feelings – who wanted what and when he wanted it. Did any of that ever really benefit them, or were they always at their best when they just...showed up to play?

Quentin's obviously not on Eliot's elevated plane of thinking yet. He frowns and says, “But--”

“You want to keep doing this?” Eliot asks, reaching for Quentin. His hand settles on Q's thigh, warm and strong and softly furred, and his heart does an annoying little jumpy-flippy thing, like when the butterflies and the grasshoppers won't stay out of their faces while they're working on the Mosaic. Quentin nods, and weirdly, that kind of – settles things, internally. Eliot exhales, heart still and strong at last. Okay, now they're communicating; they're establishing clarity, simple answers to simple questions. Eliot can work with this. “Okay,” he says. “That's it, that's the conversation.”

“Yeah, but--”

“No, you absolute-- ugh. Why are you so hellbent on making it complicated?” Eliot's genius goes _so often unappreciated_. “We raise the kid. We finish the quest. We fuck like kinky talking bunnies. That's the plan – think you can stick to it?”

Very clearly in spite of himself, Quentin's face softens into contentment. “So basically you're just outlawing romance, is that the vibe I'm getting here?”

“By royal decree,” Eliot agrees, and Quentin rolls his eyes. “You know I'm right,” Eliot says with a little kiss to Quentin's forehead. “We're not that great at romance, but we get shit done, don't we, darling?” Quentin snorts, but he doesn't dispute it. “So let's just – be about that. Let's be less about labeling it and more about just. Choosing to do this and doing it.”

In order to sell it a little more, Eliot leans in and kisses Quentin, who leans up into the kiss with a suspicious degree of sweetness. But he doesn't say anything else about romance or whatever other fucking minefield he wants to lead Eliot into by the hand, and Eliot's going to count that as a win. “Okay,” Quentin murmurs indulgently. “Then we're doing it.”

Somehow instead of inspiring them to action – sexy action or otherwise – _we're doing it_ becomes the lead-in to lolling in bed. The morning sun isn't fully up yet, but already there's more light than usual in the cabin, reflecting off the brilliant white snow piled up outside. Eliot's always thought Q looked his best in morning light, so he takes this chance to just – look, and then to hold Q's face in the palm of his hand, savoring his awkwardness and his happiness and his _presence_ until the kid comes tumbling out yelling excitedly about making pegasus wings in the snow, and life starts up again.

This life that Eliot chose for himself, like a ring and a vow and a crown and a chain, without the slightest idea what he was signing up for.

 _We're doing this_ , he thinks at Quentin, and Quentin smiles back with his eyes before he rolls out of bed – _we're doing this_ right back at Eliot, and Eliot's never going to be someone with _no regrets_ , but this morning at least he's completely sure that they're doing something right, and they're doing it this time on purpose.


	10. Sixteen Years

It's become a little bit of a ritual, the close-of-business contemplation of the Mosaic. For a daily rumination on their ongoing total failure to comprehend the fucking beauty of all life, it's actually nice. If nothing else, Quentin is always curious to know what the pattern looks like to Eliot. It always just looks like tiles to Quentin, the Mosaic itself indistinguishable from their graphs of the patterns, but then he's never had much sense about art.

“I like it,” Eliot says this evening, putting his arm around Quentin's shoulders. That always feels so nice to hear, even though it doesn't fundamentally mean anything, or change anything. Quentin leans against Eliot, gazing down at the Mosaic and idly wondering for the millionth time what it looks like – what it _really_ looks like – through Eliot's eyes.

After knowing him for almost twenty years, Eliot is still the most intriguing human being Quentin's ever met, an intricate abstract creation of secrets and vulnerabilities and polished artifice and passionate intensity, every layer moving everything else like interlocked gears. He's even more mesmerizingly beautiful to Quentin's brain than to his eyes, which is saying something.

And he'd have a fucking conniption if Quentin said anything remotely like that to him, so instead Quentin just slots himself against the familiar curve of Eliot's shoulder and says, “You do, huh?”

“Mmhm,” Eliot says. His free hand traces a tut-like flicker in the air. “The way the blue is all broken up looks like rain. Rain on the desert.”

Quentin thought it kind of looked like stars, but now that he thinks about it, that's stupid. Why are the stars blue and the sky red? Eliot's way makes a lot more sense. “So I guess now we know,” Quentin says. “Rain on the desert is not the beauty of all life.”

“Maybe it is,” Eliot says. “Water is life. What's rain if not an outpouring of life that comes for free? Grace comes to even the most parched of lives. What's more beautiful than that?”

Well, that's the fucking question, isn't it? “I don't know, El,” Quentin huffs, trying to keep the irritation to a minimum. It's not Eliot he's irritated at, after all. “I guess something, or else we'd see a goddamn key around here somewhere.”

Eliot lets him go with a fond little cuff of his big hand to the back of Quentin's head. “Doesn't mean we're not close. Let's keep the theme for at least a few weeks, swap some things around. You have any other ideas?”

That's the fucking question, isn't it? “I guess you're right,” Quentin says.

“Generally,” Eliot says breezily. “Speaking of, you know the rain's due tomorrow. Want to get the laundry off the line while I cut some greens to add to the soup?”

“You know, it feels a lot less like grace and a lot more like having to remember which day the recycling goes out, now that it's on a regular schedule,” Quentin points out.

“Not beautiful enough for you?” Eliot says.

Quentin shrugs. “I just don't think this new High King has-- I don't like him, he's trying to regiment everything so much. This is Fillory, it's not supposed to, like – function.”

“Now, see, if I said that, your feelings would be hurt,” Eliot says.

“Yeah, but I say it with love,” Quentin says, smiling up at Eliot. Yeah, he knows it's a ridiculous argument. Whatever, their _lives_ are ridiculous, that's just a fact. “I just think he's boring, okay, and he's trying to make Fillory boring, and I object on the grounds of it's a magical fairy-tale kingdom and there should be a balance between, like, narrative structure and creative spontaneity.”

“Good note. Thank you, King Quentin the Narratively Satisfying,” Eliot says indulgently, kissing him on the head like Quentin's a spoiled pet.

Quentin doesn't hate that as much as he feels like he should.

Every year, it gets a little harder for the little things to upset him the way they used to. Every year, more things becomes a little more – little. Quentin doesn't know if it's age and wisdom or fresh air and opium, but he's kind of getting...healthier, without even really trying.

If this were a story, it would be because of the Power of Love, but. Quentin doesn't know about that.

Then again. It's kind of a story, isn't it? He's on a quest to save Fillory with the High-King-in-exile, so like – it's not _not_ a story.

“I'm right,” Quentin grumbles.

“Mmhm,” Eliot says. “And I'm right about the laundry, so--”

“Dad! Dad!” Ted calls, and Quentin turns to look as his son lopes awkwardly up the hill toward them. At first Quentin thinks the weird gait is because of the way Scarlet Witch is gamboling around between his legs, bleating the goat version of _Dad, Dad!_ But as they get closer, Quentin can see that Ted's holding one of his boots in his hand.

“What's wrong with his foot?” Quentin wonders aloud.

“Why does he keep letting that thing out of the pen?” Eliot wonders, much more rhetorically. Quentin doesn't bother to answer. Scarlet Witch is a sweet, runty little thing and she adores Ted. There's no harm in letting the kid make a pet out of one baby goat, which Eliot would probably agree with if she hadn't once eaten an entire half a basket of asparagus that Eliot was saving for pickles. Quentin really doesn't see the point in carrying a lifelong grudge against a small animal, but arguing about it will only make Eliot dig his heels in, because he's part buck-goat himself: temperamental, territorial, stubborn, and kind of into dominance-mounting. At least he smells a lot better.

He's also a big liar, because don't think Quentin doesn't notice out of the corner of his eye that he reaches down to scratch the rust-colored spot on her withers while Ted is shoving his boot into Quentin's hands. “It broke, I need you to fix it,” Ted says.

“Hey, Dad, can you do me a favor?” Quentin says mildly while he turns the boot over in his hands to take a look. The stitching must have been weak to start with, because these boots aren't that old, and half the sole definitely shouldn't be stripped back and flapping loose. “Why, of course, beloved child, I would be overjoyed to help.”

“Thanks, Dad,” he says with a crooked little smile that gives Quentin a moment of pause. Ted tends to favor Quentin's side of the family, particularly Quentin's mom, but every now and then a glimpse of Arielle will shine out so strongly from him.

Eliot gets down to the business of harvesting some soup greens while hip-checking an overly interested goat. Quentin sits down on the bench and turns the boot sole-up so he can get the western afternoon light over the tips of the trees to shine on the laces. “Hey, mister, where do you think you're going, huh? Making a break for it?” he murmurs, plucking on the broken stitches and letting the shape of a boot form in his mind. He never really learned spells for this kind of thing, if there are any, and although he does pay some cursory attention to the conditions, at the end of the day Quentin doesn't tend to believe that any of that matters for workings like this. He's not making things float or starting fires with the flick of a finger or any of the splashy and unnatural tricks that Eliot performs with such uncanny ease. He's just – thinking about boots. About how they're a collaborative effort between the shaft and the tongue, the crown and the sole and the heel, all the lacings that pierce and bind the pieces – like a town, like a team, like – family, sort of, everything holding everything else into a shared promise: _if we all pull together, we'll be a boot_.

And boots want to be boots. They remember making that promise, and they want to follow through.

Everything wants to be something. And everything will reach out for what it needs to become what it wants to be. All you really have to do is remind things when they forget.... People, too, Quentin's noticed, tend to work the same way, although Quentin doesn't have the knack for putting them back together. Too complicated. The conditions are an absolute bitch.

“There you go,” Quentin says, brushing the dirt off the bottom of the shoe before he hands it back to Ted. The prodigal sole hums with relief and gratitude, purring under Quentin's fingers. Everything wants what it needs. Things just get forgetful sometimes. “How'd you manage to tear it while you were working on math problems anyway?” he asks innocently.

“Um,” Ted says, clearly stricken by his failure to prepare an excuse for this.

“Uh-huh,” Quentin says. “Did you get some of them done?”

“Yeah, some of them,” Ted says. “Well – _most_ of them, actually.”

Ugh, what a liar he is. He gets _that_ from Eliot. “Oh, good,” Quentin says. “Well, Eliot's getting dinner ready, and if you have almost all of the equations solved, then we'll only have a few left to talk about while we eat.”

The subtle threat registers immediately, because not only does Ted definitely not want to spend his dinner listening to Quentin try to sell him on the beauty of math, he also definitely does not want Eliot in the kind of mood Eliot's going to be for the rest of the evening if he has to hear one solitary fact about algebra. Eliot is _not_ biting on the beauty of math, hasn't for the past forty years and sure isn't starting tonight. “That's just mean,” Ted says.

Quentin smiles at him. “You're welcome for fixing your boot. If I were you, I'd get going on those equations.”

So they all get to work, Eliot out back in the garden and the kitchen shelter, Ted to whatever little child's woodland kingdom he's stashed his schoolwork in (it seems obvious in retrospect, but Quentin was so amazed when he realized that Fillorian kids invent fantasylands in treehouses and muddy creekside fortresses just as much as on any other world). Quentin takes his time bringing the laundry off the line and folding it into the basket. Nothing much occupies his mind, except that he's a little hungry, and he probably should've stocked the woodpile this morning, knowing that tomorrow is rain day, and the sleeves on this shirt are really too short on Teddy now but there might be enough material to let them out around the cuffs a little. Just normal stuff.

The inside of Quentin's head is so _normal_ now. He almost doesn't recognize himself sometimes.

He carries the basket in, and right away he hears Eliot's voice through the propped-open back door, singing while he gives dinner a final seasoning and stir. “ _It's easy to say but it's never the same, I guess I kinda liked the way you numbed all the pain,_ ” he sings, strong and rich. Further and further away from Earth, even Eliot's prodigious memory has been whittled down over the years, all but his favorite songs, the ones that stay with him because he's practiced them to a high gloss. He knows every note, knows them like Quentin knows _The World in the Walls_ , like an old friend. “ _Now the day bleeds into nightfall and you're not here to get me through it all, I let my guard down and then you pulled the rug--_ ”

“Hey, can we change the channel?” Quentin calls through the door as he separates Ted's clothes out from theirs.

“I'm sorry?” Eliot calls back. “Do we have criticism to offer?”

Quentin smiles to himself at the idea. “No, I just-- it's kind of dark, can't you sing something happier? I like the happy ones.” Eliot knows these Earth songs so well, and when he sings one it comes to life, Eliot's warm voice handling each note with such unbearable intimacy. The sad ones are _heartbreaking_ when Eliot sings them, and sometimes it feels good just to rest in the pleasure of the artistry, but sometimes it's just – a lot, it can be a little much.

“Your wish is my command, darling,” Eliot says (a lie, of course, nobody _commands_ Eliot Waugh, not for forty years and for sure not starting tonight), and then he launches into an appallingly dirty Fillorian drinking song with a hundred verses, and that's not the part that Quentin minds so much, but he is a little shocked at how Ted knows exactly which parts to laugh at, when did stuff like this stop going completely over his head? But okay, it _is_ funny, and Eliot plays the hell out of it, doing different voices for all the characters and everything, so Quentin decides not to be a total parent about the whole thing and just gets the bowls and the spoons together for dinner.

Arielle taught them that song, way back in the early days, before Ted – back, Quentin's pretty sure, when she was just Eliot's pretty friend with the annoying, burly boyfriend, what was his name? Lunk, how could Quentin forget that? He was _such_ a Lunk. “Whatever happened to Lunk?” he asks Eliot while they're eating by the fire. “Is he – still around, do you ever see him in town?”

Eliot raises his eyebrows in surprise. “What do you care? You loathed Lunk.”

“Well, I mean, obviously I was pretty jealous,” Quentin says, and then for Ted's benefit he fills in, “He was dating your mother when we first met. Oh my god, El, do you remember when you invited them up here and served them that awful, greasy duck that you couldn't get to marinade right?”

Eliot snorts. “I can't believe I had you convinced for an entire year that I knew how to cook.”

“You're a great cook,” Quentin says loyally.

“Yeah, _now_. That first year....” Eliot shudders dramatically. Quentin smiles fondly at him, but it's not exactly the time or place to say _I was a little distracted that year and more than a little obsessed with you, so yeah, I noticed exactly fuckall about the cuisine_. “Anyway, he's alive,” Eliot says dismissively. “I think he's going a little deaf; the last time I talked to him he kept shouting. I don't know, he could've been drunk.” Quentin has to concede that he doesn't really care that much if Lunk is slightly deaf or a drunk, but he's a decent enough person to be glad that he's, like, not dead.

They use the last hour of evening light to get little tasks finished. Ted finishes his algebra and then plays tug-of-war with Scarlet Witch; Eliot spit-polishes Ted's boots, which seems entirely pointless to Quentin, but Eliot has his own standards for sartorial matters; Quentin draws the last pattern quickly, then starts taking notes for his new project in the margins. Eventually the sun goes down and Scarlet Witch falls asleep in Ted's lap and Eliot lights the torches, and everything is soft and peaceful and good, just the part of day that Quentin loves most.

“Can I still go down to the orchard tomorrow?” Ted asks.

“In the rain?” Quentin says, and Ted makes a very teenaged whine of protest, even though Quentin didn't even say no yet.

“Oh, let him,” Eliot says. “A little mud never killed anybody.”

Quentin's not sure why Eliot literally just spent an hour cleaning up Ted's boots if he's that cavalier about the matter, but it's not worth arguing about. “I doubt they're going to harvest in the rain, and I don't want him just hanging around bothering people.”

Eliot frowns a little at him. “They're family,” he says. “They're not going to be bothered.”

“Let me think about it,” Quentin says, even though he already knows he'll say yes. He isn't personally from a family where nobody's ever a bother – Quentin was very much a bother to almost everyone he was related to, growing up – so he forgets sometimes, that ties like that feel real to a lot of people. Even Eliot's family, destructive as it was when confronted with a disruptive influence like a small Eliot the Spectacular, seems from all the stories like it was otherwise close-knit; the control and the casual psychological violence wouldn't have worked as well, of course, if they hadn't all been so entangled.

Overall, Quentin thinks he prefers his own childhood of vaguely benign neglect, but it gives him his own blind spots. He has to remind himself that Ted's grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins actually do care about him, actually see him as part of their lives, the same as Ted sees them.

Ted's world is already bigger than Quentin's, and that's a weird thought.

He's big enough now to run up and down to his grandparents' home by himself, and to swim and fish and help Eliot with the wine barrels and tear through his shoes every ten minutes, but he still demands stories before bed most nights. Quentin lies in the grass and listens to Eliot continue the saga of Buffy the Destroyer Queen; he's somewhere in early fourth season by now, cobbling together storylines from memory and seasoning them with a little bit of Anne Rice and a little bit of Margo Hanson where he's not sure how to get from point A to point B.

It's Quentin's favorite part of the day.

He almost dozes off for a bit while Ted practices the lute, gentled into mindless rest by the smell of the fire and the late-spring flowers and the parchment of the record book, by sound of the slow notes and the low murmur of Eliot's voice offering advice on finger placement. It feels like just a few years ago that Quentin could lie here looking at the stars and listening to Eliot's fingers fumble the same notes, Arielle's kind voice coaching him through, but it must have been – a lot more than a few. God, it must have been ages ago.

“Eliot, can I have a light to read tonight?” Ted asks, and Eliot conjures a little ball of heatless blue light that hovers just above Scarlet Witch's head, confusing her as she tosses her neck up and down trying to catch it, making Ted laugh.

Quentin waves at Ted when he says goodnight, but he doesn't open his eyes. He likes this comforting darkness, and if he lets the silence go on long enough--

He smiles to himself when Eliot starts to play for his own amusement, strumming scales at first until he settles on a song. “I like this one,” Quentin says after a moment.

“Is that so?” Eliot says, amusement clear in his voice. Of course he knows, but he doesn't know – Quentin doesn't think he knows – that it's always, always kind of, Quentin doesn't want to say it means something? It doesn't mean anything, except secretly in Quentin's head. “ _When my hands don't play the strings the same way, I know you will still love me the same_ ,” Eliot sings softly, like he hates to break through the quiet music of the crickets and the wind rippling the awning over the front door. “ _Cause honey your soul could never grow old, it's evergreen, and baby your smile's forever in my mind and memory_.”

Maybe Eliot sings it for Quentin, because he knows it's Quentin's favorite; that's the kind of thing Eliot would definitely do. That doesn't mean it's – _for Quentin_ , doesn't make it some kind of gesture or whatever. It's pretty to think so, but. Eliot.

Not that Quentin's complaining. God, he'd never complain about Eliot; Quentin's entire life is an impossible, fantastical maze folding inward to arrive at the precise, wildly improbable set of circumstances that means the most resourceful, sexiest, toughest, kindest, most generous person he's ever met has put aside everything in the world just to take care of Quentin and his kid. That's not something you complain about. That's – winning the lottery, at least. Maybe it's even magic.

But he's not so far gone that he thinks Eliot is perfect or something. Eliot has his flaws like any human being, and one of them is that he absolutely does not do romantic serenades, or romantic anything else.

It doesn't mean he doesn't love Quentin. Quentin's an adult, and he knows the difference between performing love and proving it.

“Sleepy, darling?” Eliot asks when the song has been absorbed back into the sounds of the night.

“Not really,” Quentin says. “Not sure I can get up, though.”

So Eliot comes over and offers both hands to help him up, and when Quentin can't hide his wince, Eliot's hand goes right to the spot on the lower left of Quentin's back and down into his hip that always locks up on him. Quentin can feel the pull and the twinge, but it's fine, he can walk it out. He doesn't say that, though, mostly because it's nicer to have Eliot's hand kneading there, softening the tight muscles. Quentin leans into him, and he chuckles, shifting his arm all the way around Quentin's back. “Better?” Eliot asks against his hair.

“Getting there,” Quentin says. “You might need to keep rubbing it...”

“You make a terrible damsel in distress,” Eliot says. Quentin grins against the side of Eliot's neck, curling his fingers around Eliot's suspender. “I need you to understand that any joke you make at this point about what you want me to rub will be _unbearably_ corny.”

“Really kinda thought you could take it from here,” Quentin says.

Which of course Eliot can. In fact, Quentin ends up getting both the backrub and the handjob, until he's too high on endorphins and too comfortable in Eliot's pile of pillows, under Eliot's feather-stuffed comforter, to do anything useful while Eliot's gorgeous, big cock slides warm and solid between Quentin's thighs, nudging the cleft of his ass and his balls. All he can do is nuzzle his forehead into a pillow and mumble, _baby, please_ and _you're so sexy_ and probably some other redundant nonsense, the same stuff he usually says when he's lost whatever wit and wisdom he usually possesses to the feeling of Eliot's strong hands holding him steady, Eliot's hot mouth sucking a sunburned flush over the curve of his shoulder.

Quentin's just a floating mess of hazy, happy nerve endings when he feels Eliot's hips shove harder and faster against him, when he hears Eliot's soft, choked-off voice in his ear. _Q_ , he always says when he comes, just _Q_ , but that and the minute or two after, that's the most tender Eliot ever is, and it's worth the world to Quentin, those secret moments when they're alone in the universe, tangled up and trembling and unaware of anything but each other.

Eliot guides him by the waist, turning Quentin onto his side because it's easier on his back than lying flat, and Quentin sighs in satisfaction as Eliot spoons up behind him. He flicks the mess away with magic, then lets his hand settle on Quentin's hip and rub in lazy circles there. Quentin closes his eyes and gives himself just these few minutes to savor their perfect mutual silence, the mellow intimacy they've earned over so many years of shared work and shared jokes and shared comfort and shared lust.

He'll never have this again, is the thing. Even if they solve the Mosaic tomorrow, if they go home tomorrow, no other part of Quentin's life will recreate the center of this maze. Who could he ever need, in the real world, the way he needs Eliot to survive here and now? Who could ever understand the life that Quentin lived for all of his thirties and most of his twenties, except the person who lived it with him? They've had no option but to be vulnerable with each other, to be _real_ with each other, in ways that Quentin very much doubts he'll ever be able to duplicate with some age-appropriate middle-aged divorcee he meets via OKCupid on his home planet. He very much doubts he'd even _want_ that, and even if he did, who'd be dumb enough to try? Nobody who'd actually met Eliot, anyway.

You'd have to be crazy to try following an act like that.

Eliot uses the tip of one finger to tap between Quentin's eyebrows. “Stop thinking,” he says, amused and affectionate.

“But I'm thinking such flattering things about you,” Quentin says with a smile. “Are you sure you want me to stop?”

“Hm,” Eliot says. “That is a conundrum.”

“Shit,” Quentin says, and he feels Eliot go wary and a little rigid behind him. “No,” Quentin explains, “it's – I just realized, I left the notebook by the fire. It'll get rained on if we leave it til morning.” Eliot sighs and pushes himself up on one arm. “I mean, I can get it,” Quentin says, rolling onto his back. “I'm the one who left it.”

But Eliot ignores him completely, stealing one of the lighter drapes off his colorful bed to throw around his waist like a sarong before he pads out through the grass to retrieve the notes. Quentin can't help but watch the way the flickering torchlight plays across the long muscles of Eliot's back, the halo it casts against his hair.

He's so beautiful. He looks like some kind of sexy forest spirit out here, free and strong and graceful, wreathed in fire and night. It suits Eliot in a way that – Quentin would never _say_ this, never in a million years – but it suits him in a way that the drapey layers and fussy ruffles he favored as the High King never did, in Quentin's opinion. Not that Quentin knows fashion, but he does know what he likes.

As well as the notebook, Eliot comes back with the full wineskin that's been hanging from the arm of one of the torches since yesterday, and Quentin doesn't say anything about that, the same as he always doesn't say anything. Eliot's not a child and he's not – well, of course he is Quentin's responsibility in a way, but not before he's his own person, you know? And what would Quentin say, anyway? _You drink a lot?_ Eliot knows he drinks a lot, he's not doing it _accidentally_.

“Thanks,” Quentin says when Eliot comes back to bed, tossing the notes at the foot of it and sitting up beside Quentin's shoulder to uncork the wineskin.

“My pleasure,” he says after taking a long swig. “What have you been writing in there, anyway? Don't think I haven't noticed all your marginalia.”

“It's – just something I-- I don't even know if it would work, but I thought if, if Ted turns out to have any ability, and if we're – you know, not here to teach him, I thought he'd like to have. Just some basic information.”

Eliot looks down at him with an odd smile. Quentin thinks it's approving, probably. “You're recreating Popper in your spare time?” he says.

Quentin chuckles at the memory of that stilted, overstuffed old textbook, at least two generations out of date stylistically. “I don't know about that,” he says. “It's probably just hedge-witch level stuff.”

“Not to be underestimated,” Eliot says. “Do you...think we won't be here to teach him?”

Quentin doesn't have an answer for that right away. He's thought about it a lot, but not at the level of saying it out loud, which feels like more of a commitment. “When he was younger,” Quentin says slowly, watching the first fingers of cloud cover smudge up the stars overhead, “I always just assumed that if we went back, so would he. But – you know, he's – he's getting older, and. I mean, what would he do on Earth, you know? Go to middle school? He's Fillorian. This is his world, it's the world he understands. I don't know. It's – I don't like thinking about being – gone from his life, but I know I wouldn't have to worry about him; there's the orchard, and one of the aunts would take him in, and. I just think that would be – kinder, I think he'd be happier here with his family.”

Eliot looks like he wants to argue, but he takes another drink instead. “Well,” he finally says. “It's a lot of hypotheticals. And it's just slightly possible that someone should ask Ted what he thinks.”

“I don't want to worry him,” Quentin says. “Like you said, there's a good chance it won't even matter.”

“Did I say that?” Eliot says. “That sounds a tad defeatist, for me. Very out of character.”

“Well, you know,” Quentin says, smiling at him. “Because he might have moved off the hill and gotten married and become a powerful Magician in his own right by the time we definitely, without a doubt finish the quest and go home with the key.”

“When we're back in our own time and we've saved Fillory, we'll make a research project out of it. Find out what great deeds of cleverness and bravery history records of our little spud. Maybe we'll befriend your – grandchildren? Great-grandchildren?”

What a thought. “I'm sure they'll love us like the weird old wizard uncles they never knew they needed,” Quentin says. It's not the worst idea in the world, but when Eliot passes him the wineskin, Quentin still sits up and takes it, because thinking about the future always does go down easier when the edges are a little soggy. He gulps down a few swallows, the neck still warm from Eliot's mouth, and after Quentin wipes his mouth with his wrist he says, “I feel like we're doing this all backwards. Shouldn't you have plied me with alcohol first?”

“That trick only works once,” Eliot says.

“Nice revisionism,” Quentin says. “I'm pretty sure your big move was plying _yourself_ with so much alcohol you could barely stand up.”

“Worked, didn't it?” Eliot says.

It didn't exactly, but Quentin doesn't want to argue about it. He corks the wineskin and drops it off the edge of the bed. Eliot watches him do it and doesn't object, although why would he? If he wants it back he'll get it back, he's fucking telekinetic. All Quentin has is the power of distraction, which he's more than happy to utilize, drawing Eliot back down to the bed and throwing the comforter over them. “I think you tried at least one other time to seduce me,” Quentin says, sharing Eliot's pillow so closely that their noses almost brush. “There was wine and everything.”

“I think you're right,” Eliot says. “How was I doing?”

Quentin hums a little. “Honestly? You were trying a little too hard.” Eliot's eyebrows shoot up in affronted surprise, and Quentin can't help but chuckle. “Come on, El, your reputation kinda preceded you, you know.”

“It damn well should have,” Eliot says. “I worked hard for that reputation.”

“Yeah, well.” Quentin's hand finds Eliot's arm, strokes with his thumb and lets his hand drag down Eliot's skin until he has Eliot's wrist and half his hand in his grip. “My interest in being your hobby until somewhere around midterms was – hm, more than zero, but you still had a ways to go. And you were a lot cuter when you were being. You know. More you.”

“More than zero, hm?” Eliot says, his little smirk just visible in the darkness.

Quentin leans in and presses a quick kiss at the corner of Eliot's smug mouth. “Shut up, you know exactly how attractive you were. Are,” he corrects quickly as Eliot's eyebrows shoot up, and Quentin takes advantage of the moment for another tiny, shutter-flash kiss. “You were awe-inspiring,” he murmurs, because Eliot's ego doesn't need the stroking, but Quentin still likes doing it. “And intimidating. And I think it took about 72 hours after we met before I was revising my self-definition from heterosexual to bicurious.” Eliot snorts, which is not exactly the wrong response to that. “Well, that's where I was at that particular moment in my life, anyway,” Quentin says wryly. “So yeah, you absolutely had a chance, if you'd played your cards right.”

Their hands, which have been doing their own thing in their own time, finally seem to settle where they belong, fingers nesting entwined, balanced together in the space between their thighs. “God, we were so young and messy,” Eliot sighs, his breath warm on Quentin's wine-cooled lips.

“We're still young,” Quentin says. “Sort of. Well, not old, anyway.”

“Yeah, how's your back?”

“Fuck you,” Quentin says, and then finally, finally Eliot moves in to dissolve his smile with a kiss.

They're still holding hands when they both ease to their backs, watching the mist curl around the moon. It's nice. It is. Quentin still – wishes they'd kept kissing, but this is also nice.

They don't kiss as much as they used to, or at least not in the same way they used to, lost and starving, until the blood roars in Quentin's ears and there's sweat under his fingers when he runs them through Eliot's curls. That's normal, though, right? There's supposed to be a honeymoon phase, and then a shift into like – married-person love. And Quentin likes married-person love, he honestly really, really does like it a lot, the way that Eliot makes him feel supported and held, seen and known.

A little bit he misses the part where they used to kiss until they'd almost pass out, but. This is still really good, too.

Out of nowhere, Eliot says, “I never apologized to you.” Quentin turns his head to look, and Eliot is smiling that narrow, sliced smile that he smiles when he's holding onto secret thoughts. It's not a very happy smile. “I wasn't very good at hard things back then.”

Well, that's true, but it really begs the main question. “Apologized to me for what?”

“For my role in the way that things ended between you and Alice,” Eliot says with an odd note of formality, like he's dutifully reciting a pre-written speech that he's worked over in his head a hundred times.

Quentin probably shouldn't laugh, but he does laugh, just a little. “Alice,” he says. “Alice Quinn.” He hasn't thought about her in so long. He loved her, maybe. He loved what they could have been, at least. If everything had gone differently, he really thinks they could've been good for each other. It's bizarre to think that when – if and when he finally goes home, Alice Quinn will still be twenty-three years old, still the exact same girl she is in his memory, but he'll be a stranger to her in almost every possible way.

Anyway, Alice isn't really the point. “Honestly, of everyone involved, I blame you the least,” he tells Eliot. “Do you remember _how_ drunk you were? Jesus, if anything, Margo and I kind of assaulted you.”

“I forgive you,” Eliot says with a note of dryness.

“The truth is....” The truth isn't always worth telling, not between them, but – sometimes it is. “I really thought you were out cold, at first. We practically dragged you up the stairs, and I just really thought you'd-- I didn't know you'd wake up until you did it.”

Why does Quentin feel even guiltier about that than about springing a threesome on someone who was manifestly way too drunk to consent? Because it's Eliot, he guesses. Because there's almost nothing worse you can do to Eliot than ignore him.

“I'm glad I did,” Eliot says. “I'd wanted you for so long. But I'm still sorry that you got hurt.”

It's unusual to hear Eliot be so...direct. _I'd wanted you for so long._ And Quentin knew that, they were literally just talking about that, but Eliot's never – never said it like that before. It makes something strange happen in Quentin's chest, an irregular jump and shudder of his heart like he's quivering on the knife's edge of their honeymoon phase all over again. Like he's seeing a new Eliot and surprising himself yet again with how much Quentin wants him. “Was a long time ago,” Quentin makes himself say. “We've had other first times since then. Better ones.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, squeezing Quentin's hand. “That we have.”

The easy move, right now, would be to drift off into sleep. It's what Quentin would normally do, sheltered in the night and the cozy bedding, wind snuffing the stars out one by one behind a veil of clouds, Eliot stretched out alongside him, both of them lulled by the retreating tide of orgasms and strong wine. It would be so easy, and easy isn't a bad thing. Quentin's had the opposite, and truthfully, he doesn't miss it.

But he can't quite forget the way Eliot said _I never apologized to you_ and _I'd wanted you for so long_. Neither of those sentences are from the usual Eliot playbook. Neither of them could have...come easily. So why say them? Why tonight?

It would be easier to let it go, but. “El?” he says softly. Eliot makes a soft noise to confirm that he's awake and listening. “Do you want to...”

Quentin doesn't even know what he's asking, honestly. Does Eliot want to what – talk? About his _feelings_ , for fuck's sake? Of course he doesn't. He – he doesn't, right?

Eliot's thumb strokes firmly up the outside of Quentin's hand, like a reassurance. “Want to what, darling?” he says, like it's easy.

_I don't know. Nothing. Never mind._ Quentin closes his eyes. Why is this hard? This is _Eliot_. It shouldn't be this hard. “I don't know, do you want to make out or something?” Quentin spits out all at once, his heart hammering and his voice weirdly high from the way his throat is trying to force the words back down. He's such a fuck-up; he makes ordinary things so _hard_ , why does he do that? _Still?_

“Sorry – what?” Eliot says. “Do you?”

“Yeah, I.” He can't believe he's still talking. He can't even open his eyes. This shouldn't be so hard. “You know, why, why not?”

Eliot untangles their hands and turns over on his side, pressed against Quentin. Quentin feels like he's going to fucking hyperventilate, he just – wants this so much, wants to know that – Eliot's still here, still his, still the same Eliot who used to want him, who used to try to ply him with alcohol and seduce him. Eliot puts his hand on Quentin's ribs where he can definitely feel Quentin's labored breathing, and probably his pounding heart, too, and after an endless pause the heat of him comes a little closer and resolves itself into Eliot's lips pressing carefully against Quentin's. “This?” Eliot whispers. “Like this?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, although technically _no_ , he wants more, god he wants so much more. “Just – kiss me, okay?”

They've had so many firsts – first this, first that, first time the other way, second starts at first times when the first-first didn't quite count, maybe – but for some reason tonight-- The way Eliot kisses Quentin tonight reminds him of his favorite first time, flat on his back (his twenty-four-year-old non-twingy back) in the middle of the Mosaic, timeless and elated and _freaking out_ , hopelessly infatuated with the cutest boy from school, Quentin's best friend.

Eliot's hand curves to fit Quentin's chest, and Eliot's tongue pulls Quentin apart from the inside. He throws one arm over Eliot's shoulder, grasping uselessly at the smooth skin of Eliot's back, while his other hand burrows into Eliot's hair, and Quentin holds tighter and tighter even as Eliot's firm, hot mouth is melting him so fast, so thoroughly that Quentin is legitimately afraid he might just slip apart into singing blood and snively tears.

Sleep doesn't matter anymore, sleep doesn't even exist. Quentin doesn't want to let go, but he has to breathe at least a little bit every now and then, and it's pretty gratifying, when their mouths draw apart temporarily and Quentin licks the thread of saliva between them to break it, how dark and glassy Eliot's eyes look, how he sucks in heavy breaths like he's been putting this off, too. Like he didn't want to stop any more than Quentin did.

The rain starts a little earlier than usual, while it's still full dark out, and the sharp splatter of the first heavy drops hitting Eliot's shielding spell makes them both jump and then grin. Quentin gazes up at him, both of them catching their breath as the rain gets louder just two feet above their heads, breaking apart and sliding off the invisible barrier, and then it just feels so right, so _easy_ , to put his hands around Eliot's face and say, “El, Eliot, god I love--”

Of course it's the wrong call. Quentin knows better.

Instantly, Eliot's fingers press against Quentin's hot, tender mouth. “Don't,” he says. “No – labels, no boxes, no-- Just don't.”

But he sounds – sad, almost, rather than angry, so Quentin decides maybe tonight-- He doesn't enjoy fighting with Eliot, but some things are worth fighting for. He thinks tonight might be one of those things. “I'm not labeling it, I'm just-- I feel the way I feel, why is that so wrong?”

It's not like Quentin doesn't say the wrong thing all the time, but it's not – this _isn't_. Nothing about it feels wrong. Nothing about it ever has.

“It's not wrong,” Eliot says, thank god. “It just – doesn't matter, and I don't want it to get blown out of proportion.”

That's better, Quentin guesses – like, on the general taxonomy of total bullshit, _nbd_ is better than _forbidden_ , probably. It's still definitely part of the phylum, though. “What doesn't matter, why doesn't it?” Quentin demands. “It matters to me.”

Eliot pushes himself up and off, but Quentin follows him right over so that now he's the one lying on his side, his free hand toying with Eliot's chest hair. Eliot sighs. “This thing we have, it's not – it's not about how we feel, it's about what we do, and we're already doing it. The kid, the quest, and – this. It's what we agreed to do and we're doing it. I'm not going anywhere and neither are you, so why--”

“Uh, because – I mean, _why not_? Because it fucking feels nice, okay, what more reason do you need?”

“We're too old for all the drama, darling.”

“Oh, don't you _darling_ me,” Quentin snaps. “Thick-headed man. What the fuck does that even mean, _drama_? And by the way, not saying it doesn't mean I suddenly stop feeling it, so--”

“Q.” Something about the unfamiliar sound of Eliot's voice-- Eliot tells Quentin the plan. Eliot doesn't plead. Quentin closes his mouth and swallows something thorny as he watches Eliot gather up his feelings in both fists and compel himself to smile unevenly. “I can't. Okay? This is our home, it's _my_ home. I poured blood and sweat into making it what it is, and – it's the only one I've ever had. If it gets all, all – fucked up and feelings-y – if it's not safe here, if something happens to change things--”

Quentin takes pity on him and drops his head to kiss Eliot's collarbone. Eliot brings his hand up to cradle the back of Quentin's head, and it's pouring now, the rain finally louder than the pounding of blood in Quentin's ears. “It's safe,” Quentin promises softly. “You're safe with me.”

“I'm sorry,” Eliot says. That's not from the playbook, either. Eliot really is in quite the mood tonight, but then Quentin guesses they both are. “I know you want more from me. You'd get more, from – someone braver than I am.”

“Shut up,” Quentin says kindly, settling his head down against Eliot's shoulder. “You're spoiling the rain.” And for once Eliot does what he's told, and Quentin closes his eyes and concentrates on the brush of Eliot's fingers over his arm, the beautiful sound of grace falling from the sky.


	11. Twenty Years

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this is -- a chapter. Mind the tags everybody, and if this feels like a little bit of a bummer, um, it is. But there's also a sequel already, so please feel free to chase this by reading [Young and Able](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23693746) which is much happier! Also, Chapter 12 will be much happier. Basically what I'm saying is, this is definitely rock bottom. Thank you all so much for indulging me, and for amazing comments, and I look forward to sharing some catharsis with you very soon.

For a while Quentin knows, but he kind of tells himself that he doesn't know, which is pathetic but.... Well, if he says something, then what? Then they fight, and Quentin has the moral high ground and Eliot either apologizes or doesn't apologize and then – nothing, nothing happens. Life goes on.

So it makes sense, from a certain point of view, to skip directly to the inevitable ending and just bypass the whole part where they fight. It's not like Quentin gets some kick out of fighting with Eliot, and in this case they could just – not. Not do that. And anyway, he doesn't _know_ anything, not really. It's all just a feeling.

He's well aware what Eliot would say that feelings are worth.

That's how it stands for – a few months. Most of the summer, he thinks; Quentin can't remember exactly when he started to suspect-- Just, a while ago.

Meanwhile, life goes on, precisely according to the plan: kid, quest, Eliot.

There's one really good summer thunderstorm (for the drama of it, Quentin guesses?), and the goats get spooked and jump the fence; all three of them have to go charging out in the dark with magic lanterns, trying to round up panicked goats who are stuck in the mud or perilously close to the drop-off to the overfull creek. It's frustrating and slightly hilarious, and Quentin ends up with a wet goat bundled into a wet blanket in his arms, laughing hysterically in the pouring rain while Eliot kisses him, his chuckle rumbling at the frequency of thunder in his chest. It feels, that night, like they're the only people in the world again, like that first year when they were in over their heads and didn't have any choice but to lean on each other and laugh.

How can Quentin say anything? Things are what they are, and – aren't they good? Isn't Quentin happy with his life the way it is? He doesn't want to change things, he doesn't want to fuck it up.

The current High King may be boring, but he's effective, and increased oceanic trade brings down the prices on things like salt, which translates somehow in Eliot's head to ice cream. Eliot and Ted build a churn with a hand crank that somehow needs salt to work? Quentin doesn't pay attention to the process, but they have ice cream this summer. Ted is ecstatic about both the new dessert option and the chance to partner on a project with Eliot, not to mention that suddenly the hilltop is the summer party destination for Fillorian youth. Eliot complains about the late-night noise and the strain on their food supply, but he doesn't mean any of it. Ted gets embroiled in his first idiotic, messy love triangle. Quentin tries to find hiding places and keep inventory of Eliot's alcohol, because even though there's no drinking age here, seriously, Ted's friends are stupid enough sober, and also Quentin's not ready for grandkids, and also Eliot is really _going_ to mean every word of his complaints if teenagers steal his good whiskey, so it's for everyone's benefit.

It's a lot of knock-on effects from the invention of ice cream. It's totally worth it.

Eliot sings more in the summer. Quentin's not sure why, but it's a pattern he's observed over the years. He sings more and he rolls his sleeves up and he sweats through the collars of his shirts while he pulls weeds and boils water for pickling the radishes, and Quentin thinks if anything he's sexier than he ever has been, grumpily telling off teenage girls for picking his squash blossoms without permission, quietly and tenderly combing through goat hair to pick off the burrs and unsnarl the knots.

Quentin would be lost without him. He'd be _nothing_ without Eliot. And even if Quentin does – know what he doesn't really know, then what's he going to do about it? He doesn't want to start fighting with Eliot. He damn sure doesn't want to stop sleeping with Eliot. He has no leverage whatsoever.

Pathetic, he knows. But rational, under the circumstances.

It's enough to keep him quiet for months. All summer long.

Quentin is fundamentally a rational person, and also basically pathetic, but it still wears off eventually. Eliot comes home from his regular trip, and he's so carefully, calmly normal as he unpacks the shopping. He doesn't smile too much or too little. He doesn't meet Quentin's eyes. And Quentin just – seethes, because he can't stand it when Eliot thinks he's so fucking clever. That Quentin doesn't fucking _know_ Eliot and can't tell when he's holding Quentin at arm's length. Quentin may be a fool, but he's not stupid, and Eliot should goddamn well know that by now.

Quentin doesn't love being cheated on, but he could've choked that down for a lot longer than he's willing to put up with being treated like an idiot.

But he's waited this long to say anything, and he's not going to do it in the middle of dinner. He plays his part just as well as Eliot can, not smiling too much or too little, hanging back and letting Eliot and Ted chatter on about music and whether to patch or replace the roof this fall and how much longer the season is likely to stretch at the orchard. He's quiet, but he's often quiet. Eliot notices, but he always notices. He doesn't say anything about it, which Quentin is grateful for, now more than ever.

They both stand up at the same time to clear the picnic table. “I will,” Quentin says. “You've had a long day.”

“Thanks,” Eliot says, and he moves to give Quentin's hair a casual stroke like he's done a million times.

Quentin pushes Eliot's arm away with his open hand. “Don't,” he says. “You smell like a barn.” Eliot cocks his head and watches carefully, silently, as Quentin gathers up the dishes and takes them around back to pump wash water.

By the time everything is cleaned up it's the low purple tide of twilight, and Ted heads down to the creek to gig frogs for the gumbo and the fast-moving little bottom-feeder fish that Eliot likes to fillet and smoke like pungent little anchovies or sardines. Quentin stands out by the Mosaic, taking in his last pattern, which looks like nothing. It's just shapes. He has no idea what he's doing at this point.

Eliot finishes whatever Eliot's been doing, and then he stands under the awning for a while, leaning against their front door with one ankle crossed over the other, like a-- God, he's so affected. Does he ever stop trying to _pose_?

Part of Quentin still thinks it's not too late to back out. He can just plead moodiness, too much heat, sore hip, broken brain. He can say it's nothing, and Eliot may or may not believe him, but they can just go back to – not doing this. Skipping ahead to the part where they just live their lives.

Jesus Christ, he is pathetic.

Eliot finally comes toward him, his boots crunching in the gravel rows between garden beds. Quentin doesn't want him coming too close, so he says, “Is it the same guy?”

Like he expected, Eliot stops in his tracks. “What?” he says guardedly.

Quentin rolls his eyes for no one's benefit but his own. “Every time you go down there, are you seeing the same guy, or....”

“Yes,” Eliot says.

And god, Quentin hates the part of him that wants to take some comfort in that, the part of him still urgently murmuring _see, he told you the truth, see, he doesn't lie to you, at least he'd never lie_ – the part of him that can't seem to stop making Eliot's excuses for him. “How long has it been going on?” Quentin asks instead, turning around finally to look Eliot in the face.

Eliot smiles, sharp and bitter and humorless. “How long have you known?”

Quentin snorts softly, but right away he fucks it up, he shows his soft underbelly by asking, “So are you – the two of you, is it – do you have feelings for him?”

It's disastrously, unbearably comforting when Eliot scoffs, rearing back slightly in genuine surprise. “What? No. No, of course not.”

“I guess you think that makes it better,” Quentin says, in defiance of that awful, needy part of him that's. Relieved. Fucking _grateful_. What is _wrong_ with him?

“Doesn't it?” Eliot says, eminently reasonable. When Quentin doesn't respond, Eliot sighs. “Quentin....”

“What, you're sorry?” Quentin snaps.

“I'm...sorry you were hurt,” he says.

Jesus Christ. “Okay, does that mean you're sorry it happened or you're sorry you got caught, because it kind of sounds like that second one.”

“I'm just trying to be honest with you,” Eliot has the fucking audacity to say to Quentin's actual face.

Quentin turns around again, staring at the shadowy lines of the Mosaic in the last rays of daylight. He literally can't stand to look at Eliot right now – Eliot, this person he's idolized and coveted and trusted and _loved_ – and it's a completely new feeling to Quentin. In all these years, he's never felt _that_. “Well,” he says. “Thank you for your honesty.”

“You know,” Eliot says slowly, “I never promised... you never even asked me to. Exclusivity isn't something you just get to assume--”

Quentin wheels around so fast he almost trips himself, and he hates that suddenly Eliot has the power to make him feel this way, so clumsy and – and helpless. “Stop,” he says loudly. Only the tight clench of his chest and throat keeping him from yelling it. “Just stop. That's the rule for, like, someone you've been hooking up with for a few months, it's not-- I do get to. After twelve years – after _twelve years_ , yeah, _I get to assume_ , and by the way you're so full of shit, because if you really believed we weren't even exclusive, you wouldn't have kept this secret from me, you _gaslighting son of a bitch_.”

The worst part is Eliot treating him like he's stupid. It's one thing to feel – hurt and embarrassed and – boring, he guesses Eliot's probably bored, and that's. Whatever, none of that is some crazy new experience in Quentin's life. But people don't talk to him like he's stupid, because he's _not_. That's the bare minimum that he deserves, he thinks.

Eliot looks away and doesn't say anything. Typical. Quentin gets sick of just standing there and goes over to sit on the bench. After a minute, Eliot sits down on the other end of it, as far from Quentin as he can, so they can – pretend, Quentin guesses, that they're both sitting out here alone.

Or at least that's what Quentin does for a little while, watching the stars come out against the fresh, deepening darkness. Pretends he's just sitting here. Pretends he doesn't have to decide what to do next. How long is he going to wait before he just – gives in and says whatever to end the fight and get back to the happy part of their life? He doesn't know. He's not thinking about that yet.

Of course, that gives his brain a lot of nice, empty real estate. Never a good thing.

When the tenth star in the Dancing Slipper becomes visible, the faint one above the heel, Quentin finally says, “What's he like?”

“Don't do this to yourself,” Eliot sighs. “He's nothing, he's just some kid.”

Some kid with a crush on Eliot, probably, confused and amazed that Eliot even knows who he is. Or maybe Quentin's just projecting. Maybe it's some kid who cares as little about Eliot as Eliot apparently does about him, maybe-- Wait, hold on. “Jesus, Eliot, please tell me it's not one of _our_ kids.” Half of the friends that come up here to see Ted are cousins and half are just age-mates who want to go where the ice cream and/or the girls are; Quentin can't always keep straight which are which, but he feels protective of all of them, and he just assumed Eliot felt the same--

“No, what?” Eliot says. “ _No_ , what the fuck. He's not a child, he's twenty-two.”

“So, still closer to Ted's age than yours,” Quentin says sourly. He may be relieved that it's not one of the boys that he personally has an avuncular interest in, but he's still not handing Eliot any _awards_ or anything. “What is this, your midlife crisis?”

Eliot sighs. He's been doing that all night. It's annoying. “Probably, but when you say it like that it sounds so boring.”

“Are you really not even going to apologize?”

“I did apologize,” Eliot says. “Would it make any difference if I said it again?”

“I mean, it might make a difference if you acted like you gave a shit.”

“I don't give a shit about this,” Eliot says wearily. “I do give a shit about you, and – I was careless with your feelings. That was my fault, and I regret it. What else do you want me to say?”

And that's the question, isn't it? What was the point of this whole conversation, what's the point of any of it? Quentin was right the first time; they could've just as well skipped the whole thing. Nothing would be different. When is anything ever any different? “I want... fuck, I'm so stupid,” Quentin says, putting his elbows on his knees and curling down into his hands. “I want you to be in love with me--”

“Q--”

“--the way I'm in love with you--”

“Q, don't.”

“No, you know what, Eliot?” he says, straightening up and looking over at Eliot for the first time. “Shut the fuck up with that. I can say it if I want, they're my feelings, you don't get to disallow the conversation just because it makes _you_ feel uncomfortable, least of all right now, because honestly I'm not that interested right now in what makes _you_ feel comfortable. I love you.”

Eliot stands up, and for a second Quentin thinks he's going to walk off, and he's not sure whether that's – sad or scary or a relief or what. But Eliot just moves a few feet away, and Quentin can see the tension in the way he holds himself, the way he flicks the torches on with his hands. It's not like Eliot, and that's – good? Maybe? Quentin doesn't want to make things worse, but he wants-- He needs for this to _matter_. They can't get better if they never even agree about whether or not this matters.

There's a surprising calmness in Eliot's voice, though, when he turns back toward Quentin and says, “I know you do, and I love you. You're my best friend, and my – family, and my partner on this stupid quest and my partner in everything, and of course I love you, Q. But you want to make us some kind of romance, and – we're not. We can't be.”

“Why can't we?” Quentin says, and he – hopes it doesn't sound like he's whining, because he's not. It's a serious question. He really wants a serious answer. “Why can't _you_ , because I do, Eliot, I feel-- It is romantic, for me.”

Eliot rubs Quentin's back when it hurts, and when he's tired of doing it he always leans down and kisses the nape of Quentin's neck and then smiles; it's the smile that Quentin remembers most, the feeling of it wide and warm against his skin, the stubble on Eliot's chin scraping between Quentin's shoulderblades. Eliot bought him a pipe the year before last for Christmas, and he whispers dirty jokes about oral fixation in Quentin's ear every time Quentin lights up by the fire after dinner, but he also looks so genuinely pleased every time he sees Quentin enjoying Eliot's gift. Eliot calls him _darling_ all the time, except when Quentin is twitchy with insomnia and cascading panic about failure, about losing their whole lives to a quest they can't complete; on those nights, Eliot gathers him into his arms and whispers reassurance in his ear and calls him _my darling, my Q_. Quentin doesn't know what kind of evidence he should be presenting in a fucking court of law, but – that's romantic, isn't it? That's how it feels to him. _We're not good at romance_ , Eliot likes to say, but he must mean that Quentin's not good at it, because Eliot is so good that it's literally effortless for him. He doesn't seem to be capable of stopping himself, so why--?

Quentin doesn't get it. He's never understood. It's just always felt before this like something they don't need to agree on; Eliot sees it however Eliot wants, and in return for not making an issue out of it, Quentin gets to be happy. Whatever you call that thing Eliot does, the way Eliot is with Quentin, it always made him so fucking happy.

“I know it is,” Eliot says gently, “but...I think that has more to do with you than it does with me.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means – your feelings are real, but you feel them because – this is who you are. You love hard, Q, and you don't compartmentalize. I'm not saying it's not real for you, but...it would've been just as real if Julia had been in that room with you when the clock opened, or Alice. You would've fallen in love exactly the same way, and made a home with them, and had babies, and-- This is who you are, darling. You're not capable of winding up your life with someone else's, but only to a certain point. You go all the way, and that's – a good thing, it's a – beautiful quality that you have. But it's not about me.” Quentin doesn't know how to react to that. It's literally never occurred to him to – analyze that particular counterfactual. What if he'd come here with someone other than Eliot? It's not a question he can answer. This place – their house on the hill, their beds, their gardens, their stove, their Mosaic, their plum wine, their ice cream, their goats – it _is_ Eliot. It's Quentin-and-Eliot, but mostly it's _Eliot_. “I've loved you half my life,” Eliot says, and Quentin's wandering brain snaps into hyperfocus, because that's not – that's not how Eliot sounds. It's raw and deep and bloody like Eliot's torn it out of himself with his bare hands. “The good half, no less,” he adds with a wild stranger's smile, “but I am not like you. I can't mate in captivity.”

“Is that...how you really feel, El? Like you're my captive?” That can't be true, can it? He's messing with Quentin's head, he's trying to manipulate Quentin into pitying him to get out of....

But he's not, is the thing. Quentin knows Eliot, has known him more and deeper and longer by far than he's ever known another human being, and this is not Eliot spinning a story. Quentin can tell himself that, but the pit of his stomach knows better. This is Eliot admitting to a truth he'd rather lie about. Quentin _knows_ him.

“I don't know,” Eliot finally says, running both hands through his hair irritably. “No, of course not, of course I don't blame you. This wasn't your doing any more than it was mine. But don't you understand that's the _problem_? If it were a person who did this to us, we could argue, we could bargain or fight or come up with a spell, but it's not. It's the goddamn gods, or it's the elder goddamn gods, or it's magic, or it's no reason, it just _happened_ this way, so what are we supposed to do about that?”

Who _did this to us_. Jesus. “I mean... do you hate it that much?” Quentin asks, trying to sound –serious, like it's a serious question they can have a serious conversation about. Like he doesn't just want to _fucking cry in peace_ , without Eliot hovering around him feeling guilty and resentful. “I thought we were...happy, basically.”

Eliot looks down at his left hand. He's wearing the bracelet that Quentin had made for him the year that Arielle died, but it's his wedding ring that he touches and twists. Quentin hates that fucking ring so much, but he's never asked Eliot to take it off, and Eliot's never offered. Everything else they came to Fillory with has fallen apart over the years, except for that ring of Eliot's, and the one he wore at Brakebills. “That's not the point,” he says. “We've made something good out of what we were handed. We didn't agree to spend our lives here, but we didn't have any choice, and we made – good things, beautiful things. A good life. This life – means the world to me, and you and Ted mean the world to me, but it's not the same as....” He breaks off and shakes his head, like it's all ineffable.

“You don't actually have to talk about us like we're dead,” Quentin says. “While you're writing our obituaries, I'm actually still trying to save--”

“Great, good for you,” Eliot says bitterly. “We're both still trying to save magic, and maybe one of these days we even will. And then what? We go home, and if it happens _tomorrow_ , we're still old enough to be our friends' parents. We _are_ parents, Q. Do we step right from that into – what, what's there for us? Maybe I go home and save Margo from being forced into a marriage she doesn't want and kids she could never actually be happy for. Well done, Eliot, what a hero. And then what? Even if Whitespire wanted me back, what do you think my golden years look like, washing down my Viagra with booze so I can pretend I'm starting all over again trying to produce an heir with my child bride? That's not a _future_ , that's an old man's delusion. Don't tell me there's still time for me to be happy. Happy is what I wanted to be when I was seventeen and I ran away from the fucking farm looking for adventures and love affairs and art. Happy is what I wanted to be when I thought I was in control of what kind of man I became, when I thought I had choices, and happy is--” The silence rings for a long moment, long enough for Quentin to wipe his eyes and for Eliot to gather his composure. When he speaks again, he sounds sweeter and warmer, like the Eliot that Quentin knows best. “How could you have chosen not to love me?” he says. “The alternative was the kind of loneliness that you're just not built for. And what is your love supposed to mean to me, if – every time you had a choice, you chose someone else? I'm not ungrateful for our life, darling. And I don't doubt that you mean the things you say. But I – see it differently, that's all.”

Clearly. Quentin sits silently in the dark while Eliot comes back to the bench, wondering – what a normal person would feel like in this moment. Is this even a set of circumstances that would exist for normal people, is there a – real-world analogue? He tries to break it down, like an equation, like a tut, looking for the component parts. Everything is a mess, pieces and parts and half-truths. Like a stack of colored tiles that don't add up to anything sensible no matter which way you lay them down.

So – fuck it, he guesses? They're in love and they're happy but they're miserable and stuck together and Eliot has a point, because getting out of this situation won't solve any of their problems, but also they're in love and they're happy, so all of that together adds up to _who the fuck knows_ , and that's. Just the way it's going to have to be for a while, Quentin guesses. “So,” he says. “Midlife crisis?”

Eliot laughs, and it releases something that's been trapped and escalating inside Quentin all this time. It's just like the first year, really, isn't it? In over their heads. Nothing to do but – laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “Pretty clearly. I don't know, Q. It was a shit thing to do, but I was just – kind of going crazy thinking about this stuff lately. And there's nothing even slightly special about him, but when I'm with him I feel – twenty-two. Like I still have a whole life ahead of me to figure things out and make my choices and live with the consequences. I know it's a lie, but it was nice for a while.”

A long, long time ago, in another world, Eliot told Quentin _becoming me was the greatest creative project of my life_ , but – the me that Eliot meant is someone that Quentin barely recognizes now, self-conscious and catty and controlling, fearful and closed-off and profoundly, terribly lonely. The great creative project of Eliot's life was as thin as a layer of paint on canvas. So who created the man sitting next to Quentin now, this resourceful, resilient man who can cook and turn plums into wine and sing and kiss and calm a crying baby and reach over the edge of a ravine to scoop up a lost goat? Magic, luck, the gods? To Quentin the only possible answer is _Eliot_ , is the sum total of all the choices Eliot made. It's strange that Eliot doesn't think so. That he doesn't feel, to himself, like the self-made man that he's always been in Quentin's eyes. They just...see it differently, he guesses.

“So now what?” Quentin asks.

Eliot shrugs. “I'll end things. They weren't going to last much longer anyway. You'll...be pissed for a while, and then forgive me, probably.”

God, this beautiful idiot that Quentin – had no choice but to love. “I'm not pissed, Eliot,” he says wearily. “I'm _hurt_. This hurts.”

“Oh,” Eliot says faintly. For the first time all evening, he finally reaches out toward Quentin, letting his hand rest over the back of Quentin's. “You know this doesn't have to make a difference,” he says. “It's still us, nothing's changed. And you're right, I kept this from you because I did know it was – questionable at best – but you have to believe that I would never break a promise to you. If you want me to promise now-- If you still want that, I mean. I will.”

“What if I don't feel like I can trust your word now?” Quentin asks, mostly out of curiosity.

“You know you can,” Eliot says.

As much as Quentin knows anything, he guesses he does know that. Feeling awkward, he scoots closer, toward the middle of the bench. “I hate fighting with you,” he says, and Eliot knows just what that means, just what Quentin needs. Eliot hugs him, and it's a little weird, a little different, but mostly the same.

Eliot strokes with his big hand over Quentin's hair and murmurs, “Just you and me, okay? Darling, I swear. You and me.”

Quentin nods against his shoulder. “But I get to ask for stuff,” he says. “I'm serious, you have to make this up to me.”

“All right,” Eliot says, sounding amused. “Ask away.”

“Okay. Well, um. First, I'm going back to the beard, I don't care if you don't like it.”

“I never said I didn't like it,” Eliot says, which is _technically_ true. Eliot really does know how to make use of those technicalities.

Quentin snorts instead of arguing, and moves on. “And I want you to drink less. Like, a lot less.”

“I need a better definition of less,” Eliot says warily.

“I don't know, we'll work out the details, but – less. And I know,” he says quickly when he can feel Eliot drawing breath to argue more, “that you handle it pretty well, and I'm sympathetic to the argument that it's nobody else's business as long as you're not making it our problem, except _that's_ over, because you're trying to make me happy now, remember? El, you drink because you think it'll make you feel good, except it doesn't, it actually doesn't make you feel better at all, and the fact that you keep trying to solve that by drinking more is – it's addict-logic. It's not okay. So you're going to try doing it less instead and see how that goes, because sweetheart, you're forty-five, and I actually need you to like. Not die of acute cirrhosis of the liver while still bragging about how well you hold your alcohol. Okay? This is important.”

“Sounds like you've thought this through,” Eliot says dryly.

“And third--”

“Jesus, seriously?”

Quentin clears his throat authoritatively. “ _And third_ , I want your ring.”

There's a puzzled beat. “You want a ring?” Eliot clarifies cautiously.

“No,” Quentin says, “I want _your_ ring. Your wedding ring. I'm not going to wear it or anything, I just want you not to wear it. Because it bothers me,” he explains before Eliot can fully get the question out. “Because you're married to someone else and I don't like that, and you touch me with it and it _bothers_ me, and I never said anything because a lot of the time I just let you do stuff because it seems easier than arguing, but now you don't get to argue, so I'm telling you that I don't like it. Give it to me and I'll put it somewhere safe; I know you'll need it back when we go home, I just don't want to see it until then.”

Eliot shifts away from him just enough to get access to his ring and work it off his finger. “You drive a hard bargain, Coldwater,” he says as he drops the ring into Quentin's palm. For the moment, Quentin ties it with a knot into the sash on his pants, just so it's out of the way, and then he leans against the back of the bench. Eliot puts an arm around him, and it's – better. It's okay. He really thinks they're going to be okay.

“Okay, so,” Quentin says softly, looking up at the stars. “Now that we've established that this is definitely your fault and not mine, I do think, um. There are productive-- positive changes that I, I could make. Just. To make it better, maybe.”

“Make what better?” Eliot says.

“Um, the – our...sex life?” God, shouldn't this be easier, after twelve years? But they've never really.... _Talking about it_ has never been their baseline of normal, not in any area of their lives and particularly not in this one. “I know you don't like overthinking, but actually that's not, not a great way to make sure everyone's – needs are met, and I probably do kind of take you for granted, to be honest--”

“Q.”

“No, I mean, I'm not, I know I'm not – really a natural when it comes to physical things, I'm awkward and clumsy and I get up in my head too much, and it helps to – like, if you tell me things, that's actually _helpful_ , I'm better that way. So if there are things you want, or that – that could be better for you, it's not going to upset me if you say that, it would actually be good to know.” He can't fully squash the bitchiness out of his voice when he adds, “Obviously I can't suddenly become a strapping village lad half your age, but – I can make more of an effort if you tell me--”

“Jesus Christ,” Eliot says, and there's some level of anger there but he doesn't really sound angry, he sounds – what? Quentin can't put his finger on it. It's not like Eliot. “Q, stop it, please don't-- none of that is true, okay? Not one word.” His arm has tightened almost defensively around Quentin, so Quentin can't pull away easily, but he does kind of twist so that he's looking up at Eliot's face instead of relaxing into the curve of his shoulder. As soon as their eyes meet, Quentin can see the flash of anger drain out, and there's no harshness at all when Eliot says, “I am so fucking sorry, darling. I'm the reason you have all this ugly bullshit in your brain now, and I'm sorry.”

The other apologies were – apologies, to Eliot, but this one feels like the way that _human beings_ apologize, which is unexpected and actually pretty nice. Still, Quentin has to be honest, so he says, “You know I don't actually need a reason for my brain to be full of ugly bullshit.”

Eliot smooths Quentin's hair back and kisses his forehead. “There's nothing I want,” he says. “You know I thought you were sexy from the minute I saw you in that ungodly ugly brown sportcoat, and I never stopped thinking you were sexy. You _are_ , and if you want – if you think it would be good for your confidence or whatever if we talk more about what we like, that's fine, but I don't need you to _try harder_. For fuck's sake, of course I don't.”

“Okay,” Quentin says. It's not quite so self-evident to him, but. He's not going to argue. “It was gray, though. The coat I took the Brakebills test in.”

“ _Spiritually_ , it was brown,” Eliot says. “All right, you can laugh,” he adds, which is good, because Quentin can and he is, “but when I literally save the world through my understanding of the emotional nuances of color theory, we'll see who's laughing.”

“Oh, my undergrad wardrobe is related to the beauty of all life, huh?” Quentin says. “Can't wait to see that pattern, let's definitely do that next.”

Eliot tilts his head so his cheek rubs against Quentin's hair like a big, careless cat. “The day we met,” he says in a matching slow, rumbly roll, “redefined beauty for me forever.”

It feels like that should be – a joke, like the spot in the conversation where Eliot's put it should be where he's encouraging Quentin to laugh and feel better, but. It sounds so intense when he says it that it almost makes Quentin shiver. “Careful,” Quentin says weakly. “You're gonna – accidentally commit romance or something.”

“I'm sorry,” Eliot says, and Quentin's still waiting for the punchline when he realizes-- “I was selfish, and I told myself it didn't have anything to do with you so it wouldn't affect you, but – this isn't my life, it's ours. Everything affects you. I'm sorry I – get drunk and keep secrets and don't open up to you and minimize what we are to each other and make you feel insecure and to feel like – like it's somehow not okay to have this, this heart that you have. You've loved me more and better than anyone ever has, and I've made it harder for you every step of the way, and I think I'm – trying to ruin this, maybe? And I don't even know why, because the last thing I want is to lose you. I'm just. I'm sorry. I want to be better at this for you, so can you just – if you want to talk to me about things that you want, that would be helpful. I swear I'll listen this time.”

Quentin laughs and hugs him, his face against the rough linen of Eliot's shirt. “I'm still mad,” he says.

“Completely fair,” Eliot says. “Although – you did say before that you weren't--”

“Yeah, I lied. I'm pissed _and_ hurt, I'm allowed to be both.”

“I'm sorry,” Eliot says.

“Okay, okay. Look, I think we should talk about – I don't know, some of this stuff you're going through. It sounds intense, and I don't know if I can fix anything, but having someone to talk to about it has to at least be a healthier coping mechanism than alcoholism and _guys half your age_ , which by the way, that's both dysfunctional and very gross. But I don't think we should talk about it tonight.” Eliot nods against Quentin's hair. “I just think we should – go to bed and sleep on all of this.”

And for a while, at least, Quentin guesses he gets to call all the shots, so that's exactly what they do. Quentin pulls Eliot around and over him like a blanket, nestling down into the pillows instead of looking up at the stars, because tonight he doesn't want to think about anything bigger or more mysterious than the two of them.

That seems like more than enough mystery for one lifetime.


	12. Twenty-Seven Years

Over the years they've replaced the little barrel smoker with a permanent smokehouse, but the heat and effort it takes to build up a fire big enough to pipe into the smokehouse – it's just too much for one dinner in the earliest, still-warm days of fall. Eliot likes to go the extra mile for an event, sure, but he's also lazy, and only getting lazier in his old age, so he pulls out the barrel smoker and spends the days before Ted leaves smoking a goat neck – Ted's favorite – and sausages for the road. It's not that much trouble. It's something to do.

He doesn't really have Quentin to amuse him this week, since Quentin is being – well. The way he can be, when it comes to change.

It's not that Eliot is unsympathetic. He just – personally would rather find something useful to do, to take his mind off things. But Quentin's brain has jaws like a snapping turtle; there's no _taking Quentin's mind off_ of anything. It's just how he is.

Eliot puts up with Quentin's flaws, and Quentin with Eliot's. That's love, Eliot supposes. Love, it turns out, is not always whispered endearments and orgasms under the stars. Sometimes it's just being decent enough to ignore it when the darling of your heart is being a surly, petulant dickbag. Christ knows Eliot's given Quentin enough to grit his teeth and ignore, over the years.

Anyway, Quentin's the one contriving his own punishment, by missing out on this past week. While he broods, Eliot and Ted are rambling down to the river to fish and betting on hands of battalion and drinking wine and gossiping about Ted's ex-girlfriend and all the youthful scandals that Quentin won't normally let Eliot tell, and most of all making music. Ted's gotten very good at a Fillorian instrument that looks like a small bong but plays something like an ocarina, almost dauntingly good, which Eliot doesn't think is just his familial bias talking; he's actually a little bit jealous.

Sometimes he thinks that on Earth, he'd have been able to give Ted so much more fuel for his musical gifts – a million choices of styles and technologies, private lessons, maybe Julliard, who knows? But then he doesn't think about it, because – that wasn't an option. Life unfolded differently for them. And anyway, Ted's happy with what he has, so who is Eliot – who's _never once_ been happy with what he has – to question that?

He knows Quentin's struggling with the reality of Ted being ready to leave. It's not easy for Eliot, either, but he's gotten used to making the best choice out of what's available to him, and in this case it's to enjoy Ted's company as much as he can in these last days, and to prepare the best smoked goat neck of his entire life for their last dinner.

There's one setback a few days in advance, when one of Ted's light noose traps catches a goose instead of a duck, and he decides with youthful bravado to try handling it by himself. The goose escapes, but not without leaving Ted with a pretty good bite taken out of his hand and what at first looks like a broken arm. It's not broken, it turns out, but it no doubt hurts like hell, and it blossoms into a long racing stripe of bruising from wrist to damn near his shoulder. Eliot puts some salve on it – with a goose-fat base, ironically – and advises him not to use it much for the next day or two, but Ted's more embarrassed than injured. “If this is how I'm going to do on my own....” he grumbles.

Eliot claps his uninjured shoulder lightly. “Then you'll live,” he says.

Ted is so young, so full of dreams and self-doubt and restless longing for something he can't name.

He's the same age Quentin was when they came here – almost the same age Eliot was when he was crowned the High King of Fillory. Holy _fuck_ , they were so young. What business did they have playing around at quests and thrones and doing battle with gods? But there was no one else to do it for them, was there? There was only Eliot and Quentin and their best friends and one ex-girlfriend and a few other assorted co-conspirators, and not a single adult in sight. If Eliot thinks about it too hard, it might break his heart. They were twenty-three years old, give or take, with simultaneously too many choices to make and never anything like enough.

The irony is that Ted, with no magic and no king's blood in his veins, will have more choices than they ever did – will have all of Fillory ahead of him to explore in ways his fathers could only dream of. What could Julliard or Brakebills ever have done except get in his way, fix his feet to a single path?

Eliot's actually a little bit jealous.

The goose incident isn't serious enough, in the end, to delay the date, so Eliot hauls out the smoke barrel and gets to work.

By the end of the afternoon he remembers why he eschews work if at all possible. He's hot and sweaty, the scent of blood sticks in his clothes and smoke in his hair, but he has tonight's entree, plus half a dozen sausages to wrap up and stick into Ted's traveling bag alongside the heavy crackers he's been baking like a goddamn Keebler Elf for the last week. He's exhausted and impatient and he still doesn't feel like he's done enough, not if this is going to be – the last time they're all together –

Which it won't be. Probably.

Eliot comes up from washing at the ford; he cheated and used Marillon's Magic Laundromat on his shirt, an abrasive spell that significantly shortens the lifespan of Fillorian linen, although it once kept Eliot in the same soft blue shirt for absolutely ages – a shirt that, after a year of continuous wear, remained smart enough to seduce a man in. Well – Quentin, anyway, who is admittedly not the most elusive of prey.

“What are you smiling about?” Ted asks, using one hand and a sharp knife to deftly flick thin slices of peach in a spiral around the top of his custard pie.

“Nothing in particular,” Eliot says, leaning against the support beam of the oven shelter. “Look at you showing off.” Ted smiles a little and does it again. “Speaking of sleight of hand, how's your father?”

Ted shrugs. “Working,” he says with a faint motion of his head toward the cabin and, by implication, the Mosaic on the other side. “I don't know, Uncle Eliot. Maybe – it doesn't have to be tomorrow?”

“It's a mistake to wait too long,” Eliot says. “You want to give yourself time to find somewhere comfortable before the snows. Winter's no time to be homeless.”

He frowns down at the scraped-clean peach pit between his fingers. “I meant...it doesn't have to be.... I could go in the spring.”

“You were going to go last spring,” Eliot reminds him gently.

Ted huffs. “I know, but it was too soon after.... I just wanted to make sure he was over it.”

Eliot touches Ted's back where he sits hunched over the low table, worrying the pit back and forth in his hand. Last winter was hard – hard in a way things hadn't been for Quentin in, god, years. He'd been on his feet again by spring, but the experience seemed to shake Ted up; when he'd last seen his father bedridden, Ted had been nine or ten years old, willing to accept the vague explanation of _illness_ , but seeing it again as an adult was, Eliot guesses, something different.

It's not that Eliot is unsympathetic. It's a strange experience, to know someone who is thoughtful and logical and even-tempered and sober, sober in every sense of the word, and watch him sink under the surface of an invisible ocean, consumed by an invented world. It doesn't get easier with time; it gets harder, the better you understand just how askew from reality Quentin's haunted imagination can get. Eliot knows.

“But he's better now,” Eliot says, which is the only answer he has to give Ted, just like it's the only answer he's ever been able to give himself. Usually it's not very severe. If it is severe, he gets better. In the meantime, you just – find something to take your mind off of it, and you wait. “And I know he's being a little obnoxious at the moment, but trust me, he doesn't want you to just – give up your life. You've been ready for a long time.”

“You'll take care of him?” Ted says, looking up at Eliot with Quentin's dark eyes, Quentin's little crease between his brows.

“If he doesn't piss me off too much,” Eliot says lightly.

“It's not a joke,” Ted protests, even as he smiles.

“I don't know how else to take it,” Eliot says.

Under what circumstances would he ever not take care of Quentin? Eliot's outlasted girlfriends, wives, blood relatives, best friends, magic itself. When everything else let go of Quentin, Eliot remained, hanging on for dear life.

It's not exactly the legacy that Fillory promised him, but for what it's worth, Eliot's turned out to be really good at this one thing.

There's this fear in the back of Eliot's mind that their final dinner, in spite of the absolute perfection of Eliot's smoked goat neck, is going to be a clusterfuck. Quentin can really commit to his dour moods when he feels like it, and Ted has not managed very successfully to use altruistic concern for his doddering old parents as a cloak for his own anxieties about leaving home, and Eliot _has_ managed very successfully to cloak _his_ anxieties, which means they're going to come bursting out like a lion at any moment. There's a lot of room for this to go wrong.

But it doesn't go wrong. They eat and eat, and Quentin is, for the first time all week, in a talkative mood, so he tells funny stories about how helplessly ignorant they were when they first came to the hill, tender stories about how Arielle used to tease them while she rescued them. Eliot tells a little bit of Buffy the Destroyer Queen, for nostalgia's sake; Ted pretends he doesn't care about children's stories now that he's grown, but who's he fooling? He's a Coldwater. Quentin and Ted sip whiskey together (tragically, Eliot doesn't drink the hard stuff anymore), and once he's warmed up a bit, Quentin lets himself be coaxed into dancing as the sun goes down while Ted plays for them. Even as it gets colder in the twilight and Eliot can feel Quentin shivering, he doesn't suggest stopping, just crowds closer and surrenders himself to the heat of Eliot's body.

At full dark they stir the fire up higher and bring over blankets, none of them willing to call a close to the evening. Maybe it's just sobriety, but Eliot's chest aches when he thinks about how in only hours, this will be a memory – so soon, so quickly, god, how he used to hold Ted in his arms and pace the yard with him while he fussed and teethed, and now how far they've all traveled without moving a mile. That baby is Eliot's friend now, bright and brave and kind in the way only a young man who's never been unloved can be, and it's fucked up how life unfolds, because at twenty-three Ted is infinitely better suited to being a king than Eliot and Quentin ever were.

Nobody wants it to end. Ted recounts every boring detail of the last match he and his cousins played of a bocce-like game that Fillorian boys live for. Quentin tries and fails to explain Welters (it's not his fault there is no logic to Welters). Even when they're all half-asleep, they stubbornly stay on the cold ground; Ted and Eliot sing showtunes in quiet, lazy harmony, I Don't Know How to Love Him and What I Did for Love and Some Enchanted Evening, and Quentin tucks himself under Eliot's arm, smoking a pipe filled with a sweet herbal blend that's less intoxicating than the Fillorian air.

“Tell me what I need to know,” Ted says after polishing off the whiskey. “The most important thing. It's my last chance, I don't want to leave without – what's the thing I should know, more than anything else?”

“There are no special occasions,” Eliot says, even though this is one. What he means is-- “If you find something beautiful, use it every day. Don't save it.”

“I don't have very many memories of my mother,” Ted says softly. “But I remember...sitting in the grass, right over there, and she was sitting next to me, painting those flowers under the window. I remember asking her why, and she said it was just to look pretty. I wanted to help, so she let me--”

“Paint the backs of your hands blue,” Quentin says. “I remember, too. You always wanted to be doing whatever she was doing.” The fire illuminates Ted's soft smile. His smile is the only thing about him that's ever reminded Eliot much of Arielle. “I don't have much life wisdom,” Quentin says, “but if I had to say.... I would just say – I would say – work hard. Be honest. And – find someone, if you can. As soon as you can. Life's just-- There's too much of it to face alone, we're not – made to be alone. Find someone to make your life with.” Eliot rests his cheek against Quentin's head, watching the twisting flames shooting sparks that spiral upward into the blackness.

When Ted finally gets up he wobbles on his feet, so Eliot offers him a steadying arm on his way to bed, and then brings him some crackers and a bowl of plums to soak up the whiskey and hydrate him a bit. Ted sits up in bed when Eliot pushes the curtain to his alcove aside, and he looks grateful and embarrassed as he accepts the bowl. “You know what's funny?” he says around a mouthful of plum.

“What?” Eliot says.

“I remember my mother, a little bit. Being in her lap, or her letting me help with something. Little things here and there. But I don't think-- I don't have any memories of her and Dad together.”

Eliot frowns. “Well, you were young,” he says. “They loved each other. Very much.”

“I know,” Ted says. “I could always tell that from the way he talks about her. I just.... All I remember about Dad not being alone is you, do you – see what I mean?”

“I suppose,” Eliot says, although he really doesn't know why this seems to mean something urgent to Ted at this particular moment.

“You raised me together,” Ted says. “That should – that should make you married, shouldn't it? But you never say you are, and I don't know why. I don't know why you don't want to be married, is it because of Mom, because you don't think she'd like it?”

Eliot's actually – never thought about it. Not quite in those terms, at least. “No, that's not why,” he says, because he's sure of that part, at least. “I don't know why, I just. Never felt the need to call it anything. We were friends first, and – then there was you, and – I don't know. What you say about someone isn't as important as what you do for them.”

“So it's not because you don't want anyone to think you're my father?” Ted says, and Eliot could just – crack in half from the force of this colliding into him from behind, where he never saw it coming at all.

“Hey,” Eliot says, crouching beside the bed, both hands gripping Ted's forearms. “No, I – _no_. Q's your father, but I – but you know I--”

 _Does_ he know, though? It's so clear to Eliot, so perfectly obvious, but that doesn't mean that it – goes without saying, necessarily. Ted leans forward and puts his arms around Eliot's shoulders from above. “I don't know, it's stupid, I'm drunk,” he laughs hoarsely. “I just love you, Uncle Eliot. So much.”

“I know, spud,” Eliot says, softly rubbing Ted's arms. “You know, we always – not always, but after we were together, your dad and I had this little-- We would say, _the kid, the quest, and us_. That was the order. That was what mattered. You were always first, okay? I want you to know – both of us, we. We wanted to be good parents to you more than anything.”

“You were,” Ted says. “You are.”

Ugh, so no doubt when he goes back outside Eliot looks exactly like the weepy, sentimental old queen he's loathe to admit that he is; he's grateful for whatever cover the darkness provides as he takes a torchlit stroll around the Mosaic.

“What are you seeing?” Quentin asks as he banks the fire for the night.

Colors. Shadows. Contrast. Time – time – time – thirty years of his life, almost. “Nothing interesting,” he says. “Any inspiration for tomorrow?”

“Not really,” Quentin admits. “We can take some time tomorrow and look at the journals. Something might pop out.”

“Couldn't hurt,” Eliot says.

Eliot used to think that he knew a lot about beauty; he thought he was an aesthete. Well. People think a lot of things about themselves when they're young. Life puts all those theories to the test, doesn't it?

Tomorrow morning, Ted will put his foot on that road for the first time, and he'll learn all the ways he was right, all the ways he was wrong. Is it less of a quest than Eliot's? Is it a _different_ quest at all, in the end? Eliot's jealous, honestly. The setting out is the most exciting part, ripe and juicy with possibility.

Coming up behind his shoulder, Quentin says, “I know you're thinking,” in a vaguely accusatory manner.

Eliot smiles a little and doesn't resist as Quentin's hand finds his. “No one can do this alone,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “That's-- The thing you said, it's almost the same thing the Great Cock told me when he gave me the quest.”

“Well, I've never been all that original,” Quentin says pleasantly. “I bet a lot of people have said that. About quests. About life.”

“Are they the same thing?”

“It's nice to think so,” Quentin says, although he doesn't sound very committed to the position. “I don't know, they sort of – start the same way, but they end up pretty different? Like, at the end of a quest, either you succeed or you don't, but that's not. That's not how life works, is it? No one shows up to hand you a key and go _congratulations, you're excellent at being a person now, enjoy your retirement_.”

“You think we'll get into heaven?” Eliot asks. He's joking. He thinks he's joking. He is, isn't he?

Quentin laughs, so he must be. “You know, I've actually been to the Underworld. It's – you know, it's okay, but it's not really _heaven_. And everyone winds up there eventually, so it's kind of like. The ultimate participation trophy. Again, very un-questlike.”

“You think we'll solve the puzzle?” Eliot asks, and this time he's not joking at all.

“I do,” Quentin says. “I really do think so. I mean, someone does, and – I believe it's us.”

And maybe it's that simple. Someone does it. Why not them? It's something to believe.

 _The quest I bestow on you is the task you were born for_ , a semi-divine aesthete once told Eliot. _You are a good king, but it is time to become a great one._ That was – nice of him. He was a preening buffoon, but honestly a very nice one, and Eliot's been called the same but without the _nice_ part, so. There's that.

Is this the task that Eliot was born for? Color and shadow and contrast, and time and time and time – all of his youth, the better part of his life tethered to this quiet hilltop under alien stars, a bandager of goose wounds and a fermenter of plums, butcher and baker and candlestick maker – _this_ , all of this, is this the work that earns him greatness and glory and the gratitude of future generations? It's not how the stories go. It's not like any quest Eliot's ever heard of; it's a lot more like life, except with a key and a crown at the end of it. In theory.

Eliot frees his hand, but only to drape his arm around Quentin's shoulders. “What do you see?” he asks, nodding toward the Mosaic.

“Failure,” Quentin says, all too quickly. But he relents then, sighing and shifting his weight into Eliot's side. “I don't know,” he says. “It's hard to care about it some days. Hard to-- I mean it's hard to remember why it matters. It's just a bunch of squares.”

“But we're turning it into beauty,” Eliot says. “That's the point of the quest, isn't it?”

“I don't know the point of the quest,” Quentin says. “I just work here.” After a quiet minute, he adds, “I don't really think I – get art. I know some of the patterns look nicer than others or whatever, but I don't.... None of them are beautiful to me. Not really, not like – like the stars are here. Or like you are.”

“That was surprisingly smooth, Coldwater,” Eliot says indulgently.

Quentin laughs. “Unfortunately for my future as an international playboy, I can only manage that kind of thing when I mean it.”

“I know, it's one of your charms,” Eliot says. He turns toward Quentin, pulling him closer with one arm around his waist, using the fingertips of his other hand to stroke affectionately down Quentin's bearded jaw; the beard was such a scraggly mess for a whole year, but once it finally started coming in nice and thick and even, Eliot's grown awfully fond of it. “It's just going to be us, starting tomorrow,” he says. “Think you're ready for it?”

“Oh, listen to you,” Quentin says with a grin on his face and the hint of a scoff in his fond voice. “What do you think you've got that I can't handle?”

“Well, that's a little hurtful,” Eliot says, just to play his part. “Don't you know who I am?”

“Oh, I've heard all the stories, Eliot Waugh,” Quentin says in a low purr, pressing in closer to Eliot's body. “They say the boys used to line up outside your door. You know – back in your day.”

Eliot laughs softly. “I'm so glad my reputation still precedes me,” he says before he leans down and tastes the whiskey that clings to the seam of Quentin's lips.

They kiss all the way over to the bed, fingers sliding between buttons and through belt loops, stumbling and catching each other. Quentin lets himself be pushed to the mattress, already busy divesting himself of his vest and necklace, until he seems to get distracted, hands going still as he looks up into Eliot's face. Eliot pauses, one knee on the edge of the bed, hands braced to either side of Quentin's body. “What?” he says.

“Nothing,” Quentin says. “Just – I don't know. You.”

“Nothing you can't handle,” Eliot reminds him wryly.

“True,” Quentin says, but his eyes say something else, something Eliot still – fears, but not more, now, than he craves it.

You only live once, after all, and he's almost assuredly not going to heaven. What's he going to say to all the other old queens when they're playing boring board games in the Underworld for eternity? It's too late for _I never got my heart broken_ , so he might as well go with _I had a good man, he really did love me, he made it all more beautiful than I deserved_.

They undress under the blankets, and they take a few slow moments of easy pleasure when it's done – lying skin-to-skin in the circle of each other's arms. Eliot nuzzles Quentin's gray beard (they've both gone gray, but Quentin much _more_ so; it's the little victories, at this point), feeling Quentin's cock wake up gradually from its whiskey binge and shift against Eliot's thigh. “What do you want?” he murmurs, letting his palm curve against Quentin's chest, punctuating the question with a nibble to Quentin's lip.

“Mmm,” Quentin says speculatively, hooking his leg around Eliot's legs. He works a hand into Eliot's hair and twists a little; Eliot rolls his head to the side with the motion, and Quentin breathes against his ear, brushing his lips along the shell of it until Eliot can't pretend to be unmoved anymore, until he has to fist the blanket under his hand. “I want....” Quentin says, hot and soft and breathy, god, Eliot's man, _Eliot's man is so sexy_. “I want to come in your mouth – down your throat. Come on, baby, show me how you used to keep those boys lining up.”

“You make it sound so dirty,” Eliot says. Not that he's complaining. “Maybe my gentleman callers admired my wit and charm, ever think of that?”

“Please, you didn't like anyone bright enough to appreciate your wit,” Quentin says with a very endearing note of petty jealousy in his voice.

“I liked _you_ ,” Eliot reminds him.

Quentin kisses his temple. “I was different.”

No arguments there.

Quentin's cock feels exactly right against Eliot's tongue, firm and smooth but still in the process of filling out; Eliot loves the feeling as it gets heavier, weighing his jaw down. It's dark and cozy under the blanket, and as Eliot fits his hand into the fold of Quentin's groin and pushes his leg over a bit to make more room, he can feel the hair and the sweat and the good, solid muscle shaped by hiking and carrying and being mediocre at bocce. It feels so earthy and masculine and _right_ , Quentin's strong, unfussy body under his hands, that it restores, for half a second, Eliot's shaky faith in God or destiny or whatever created Eliot with this limitless, insatiable hunger, fashioned him precisely to the shape of Quentin's need.

Two parts of one whole. Like this, suffused with heat and emotion, lightheaded with the roar of blood and the ache of nerve endings coming alive where they contact Quentin's skin, Eliot almost doesn't hate the idea. _No one can do this alone._

Quentin gasps, sticking one hand under the blanket to grab at Eliot's hair, and Eliot smiles to himself and curls his tongue under the head of Quentin's cock again, _again and again and again_ for _years and years and years_ , and _oh, my darling Q, tell me we're not running out of time, not closer every day to the end, tell me we were born for this and the world will never take us away from here...._

He doesn't even realize until Quentin floods his mouth that he's fisting his own cock almost desperately, each stroke bolting up his spine. It feels so fucking good, but Quentin's hand is palming his back, trying to pull him upward, and he shuffles forward on his knees until he's sprawled over Quentin's body, the tip of his cock nudging against Quentin's belly as Eliot jerks it. He might be making some weird, embarrassing noises, judging from the way Quentin mumbles soothingly, “It's okay, it's okay, you're good.” He closes his legs around Eliot, anchoring him, lipping and licking his own come from Eliot's stubble where it spilled over. “Baby, you're so good, I love you so much.”

He doesn't _dislike_ it when Quentin says that sort of thing, so much as he usually just doesn't know how to respond. It's all right like this, when Eliot is hot and high and mindless, when he can just gasp, “Me too, I love you, too,” against Quentin's temple and then come all over him.

It's all right like this. He doesn't dislike it at all.

 _The afterglow_ is a term that Eliot never really understood until he was – what? In his thirties? He used to think it was just a temporary safe zone where everyone admitted that their brains didn't work yet and they shouldn't be obligated to make small talk, but it took him ages to feel the _glow_ of it. Now it's Eliot's favorite part of sex. Imagine that. He loves feeling the cool night air whisk off their sweat the way magic whisks off the rest of it. He loves slow, impulsive kisses that don't lead anywhere. He loves the weight of his lover's arms around him and the gentle tug as kind fingers comb through his mussed curls and the way he feels completely present, completely fearless, completely held. For a few minutes, Eliot is himself, and he's happy, and he glows.

“I hope,” he says softly when he finds his tongue again, squeezing Quentin close, “this means your mood is improving.”

Quentin laughs against the crook of his neck. “Seems to be,” he says. Then he sighs and says, “I've been a real dick about all this, haven't I?”

“No,” Eliot says, although the honest answer is probably, _eh_. “I'm sad, too, I'm just. Better at repressing it than you are.”

“That's actually nice to hear,” Quentin admits. “Everyone seemed – excited about it except me. It was kind of grating.”

“I'm excited for him,” Eliot says. “Doesn't mean I'm not going to miss him.”

They take a pause to put some clothes back on before settling back in, tucked among the blankets and looking at the stars. The Dragon's Nose. The Quill. The heel of the Slipper peeking up just over the top of the trees. Eliot can spot three times as many constellations in Fillory as he could on his homeworld. “Sometimes I just, like – can't take it in,” Quentin says. “We made a _person_ together. Literally an entire human being.”

Eliot smiles at the sky. “Well, I was – not involved in the making part of the process,” he says. “I don't want to be that guy who steals the credit for all of a lady's hard work.”

Quentin chuckles. “No, but. I don't know how to say it exactly, but it feels like – like Arielle and I made a baby, but you and I – we made a person. The person he is, that's. That was us, mostly. Does that sound bad?”

Not to Eliot, but his is not an unbiased opinion. Instead of answering the question, Eliot says, “I see so much of you in him.”

“So do I,” Quentin says. “That's probably why I worry so much.”

Eliot toys with the idea of saying _don't worry so much_. Or _you have always been stronger than you think you are_. Or _he's easy to love like you are, so he won't be alone for long_. But why spend the last drops of his late-night energy fighting an unwinnable war like talking sense to Quentin's warped self-perception? That's the whole rest of Eliot's life, and he needs a break. “Tell me about the beauty of all life,” he says instead. “Where do we go from here?”

“Eliot,” Quentin whines, not without affection. “It's the middle of the night.”

“Hey, some of us are on an _important quest_ , here,” Eliot says. “The beauty of all life. What've you got, Coldwater?”

Quentin sighs and shifts around. His toenails scratch Eliot's shin. “Circle of life,” he says. “We become our parents. Our kids become us. Life keeps happening forever.”

God _fucking_ forbid. “Hate it,” Eliot says lightly. “And you also can't make a proper circle with square tiles, you know they never look right.”

“Hey, I thought this was brainstorming time,” Quentin complains. “Aren't you supposed to _yes, and_ me?”

“ _Yes, and_ I won't be a party to the scurrilous lie that the foundational principle of beauty is _straight people_ having _reproductive sex_. The very thought.”

“Okay, there are some holes in the theory,” Quentin laughs. Eliot can hear that mellow drag of encroaching sleep in Quentin's voice as he says, “Your turn. Tell me about the beauty of all life.”

Eliot has no lack of thoughts on the subject. He's thought about beauty, longed for it, sacrificed for it all his life. He's become a goddamn fire-breathing dragon since he came to this hilltop, hoarding every sliver of beauty available to him, guarding it all like treasure. A pot of eyeliner. A little woodblock print of a mouse in waistcoat and a too-big crown. A pirate with the most magnificent blue eyes that Eliot once spent a snowed-in week with above a tavern in Whitespire, whose name Eliot never learned and never needed to. The blue shirt he wore for a year, how soft and easy it felt falling across his shoulders, and how it felt falling away from his skin when the love of Eliot's life slipped the buttons open with trembling hands, looking up at Eliot with fear and want and surrender. The golden ring that Quentin keeps tucked away in his shaving kit, a quiet promise to protect Eliot from his own past. The blue flowers painted under his windows, all the colors of the mismatched pillows on his daybed, the first hot mouthful of caramelized onion in plum vinegar right from Eliot's iron pan. Balanced proportions. Symmetry. Color and constellations and form and light and love and love and being loved and being so in love that sometimes he has to sing or else he might stop breathing.

It's been three decades since Eliot sipped good wine from fine crystal stemware, but he's kept his vow and he's let that vow make him the man he is: when he found something beautiful, he never locked it away, he reached for it and touched it and held it in his hands every day – every day as the days went by. With far too few choices to his name, Eliot chose that and he hung onto it for dear life.

“I don't know,” Eliot says. “Peacocks.”

“ _Peacocks?_ ” Quentin laughs. He has the loveliest laugh. He laughs so much more than he used to, even on the less-good days.

“Well, it is quest-adjacent,” Eliot points out. “And they have those big, showy tails that take up too much space and get in the way and don't serve any useful purpose, other than to be beautiful. What if what's beautiful about life is that we always make things just slightly _too much_?”

“I hate to break this to you, but sexual selection is a thing,” Quentin says. “You took us right back to reproductive sex, which I have to say I think is extremely heteronormative of you. I'm disappointed.”

At fifty, the great love of Eliot's life is still such a _brat_. “Regardless of evolutionary origins,” Eliot says with dignity, “wanting to fuck people who go a little overboard is hardly an exclusively heterosexual phenomenon.”

“Neither is raising kids, but you were real judgy when I suggested that.”

“I can't believe you're insulted that I withheld the _yes, and_ ,” Eliot says. “Don't worry, darling, you're still cute when you're wrong.”

“Oh, shut up and sing to me,” Quentin grumbles.

Eliot rearranges his arm around Quentin, preparing to give himself a little more lung room. “Sing what?”

“The one I like,” Quentin says with a little smile that Eliot can feel curving against his chest.

He could argue that Quentin likes plenty of songs, but it's a waste of energy; after all this time, of course he knows Quentin's shorthand, Quentin's references, all the minutiae of Quentin's moods and preferences. Of course by now, there's no separation between Eliot's knowledge of Quentin Coldwater and his love of him. It's beautiful, when you think about it, how the two have grown up together and shaped around each other like a vine fusing into the trunk of a tree.

Maybe he'll mention that later, for the Mosaic – something about a vine and a tree, although spirals also seem difficult to create within the limitations of the medium. He'll bring it up tomorrow anyway. Tonight he just lies here on the top of a hill that, to the naked eye, is uncannily like an Indiana farm, where stars he never dreamed of shine over a home he never expected, and he softly sings _take me into your loving arms, kiss me under the light of a thousand stars,_ to the darling of his heart, to the man he loves and gets to hold in his hands every day.

Every day. Every day. For dear life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all! I know you've read a bajilion 3X05 stories, and I hope you feel like this one was worth going back to the well for. I have another story called Young and Able, which is a stand-alone 4X13 fixit that is actually the same versions of the characters, if you're now wondering what becomes of them back on Earth. I'm always slightly hit-or-miss on responding to comments, but I assure you that I read them and treasure them, and I try to make an extra effort to respond to last-chapter comments. Thanks, and I'll see you -- for the next thing, whatever the fuck that's going to be! In the meantime, I'm @spiders-hth-is-an-outlier on Tumblr.


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